Institutional investor activism and market confidence

The Coalition's mission is to represent Canadian institutional shareholders through the promotion of best corporate governance practices and to align the interests of boards and management with those of the shareholder. [...] The first phase was a paper commissioned by the Public Policy Forum, and prepared by Tessa Hebb entitled Market Confidence and the Role of the Institutional Investor which provides a description of: • the current context of institutional investor activism in Canada; • the tools that institutional investors use to influence management; • the major developments relating to the growing influence of i [...] The second is the increased concern over corporate governance standards and the decline in stock market performance that accompanied the collapse of the technology bubble and the failures at Enron and WorldCom. [...] There has been a substantial difference between Canadian and US public policy responses to the collapse of the technology bubble and revelations of major malfeasance in the boardrooms of America beginning in 2002. [...] Much as we saw in the early 1930s, the heavy hand of regulatory supervision is at the core of the US response to the corporate governance crisis in America.