Corporate and securities regulation appears to be moving rapidly towards a more shareholder (rather than director) centric governance model, wrote Edward Waitzer, Jarislowsky Dimma Mooney Chair in Corprorate Governance in York’s Osgoode Hall Law School and the Schulich School of Business at York University, in a column about changes in securities rules in the National Post July 29:

The immediate issues are the impacts of this trend. For one, the politicization of corporate governance has become a preoccupation for boards, arguably at the expense of other significant issues. Another is the fact that the process is now fuelled by a thriving cottage industry that has evolved around shareholder voting. This raises concerns about the separation of voting from investment decision-making, the delegation of the former to proxy advisory firms and the manner in which that process may serve to exacerbate short termism in corporate decision-making (measuring performance in, at best, annual cycles).

Somewhere along the line (in our rush to pile on new corporate governance standards) purpose and process have become divorced. The irony is that, even as we impose ever-increasing accountability requirements, public distrust in the efficacy of the system continues to escalate.

Waitzer's complete article is available on the Post's website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– York University’s daily e-bulletin.