Thank you very much.
Mr. Chair, members of the committee, thank you for inviting the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance, colloquially referred to CCGG, to present to you on the topic of Bill C-25. My name is Stephen Erlichman. I'm the executive director of CCGG. With me is Catherine McCall, CCGG's director of policy development.
Before I provide my remarks, let me say a few words to introduce CCGG.
The coalition was founded in 2002 to promote good governance practices in Canadian public companies whose shares are owned by our members. CCGG's members include a wide range of institutional investors, primarily pension funds and third-party money managers, that have an aggregate of approximately $3 trillion in assets under management. Millions of Canadians rely on returns from these investments to fund their retirements. A full list of CCGG's members is available on our website at ccgg.ca.
The coalition is widely recognized in Canada as a thought leader in corporate governance. We are regularly consulted by governments, regulators, and stakeholders for our views. Just yesterday, we intervened at the Supreme Court of Canada in the Livent case because of certain issues we believed were very important in the corporate governance context.
When we last appeared before this committee in 2009, we recommended many of the changes that are in Bill C-25 relating to the governance of public companies under the Canada Business Corporations Act, colloquially referred to the CBCA. We are pleased to return today to offer further comments and suggestions. At the outset, I note that all our recommendations relate to part 1 of Bill C-25, which concerns amendments to the CBCA. In particular, we are concerned with provisions that apply to distributing corporations, the term used in the CBCA for public companies.
To begin, my colleague, Catherine, will address the key provisions of C-25 that should be maintained going forward. Later, I will review recommendations for further improvements to corporate governance under the CBCA.
Catherine.