Andrew MacDougall
May 12, 2020
Big Canadian companies looking to access the federal government’s new Large Employer Emergency Financing Facility (LEEFF) will need to adopt much more detailed disclosure of climate risks to their business, and that condition is a “meaningful obligation for companies to take on,” Osler partner Andrew MacDougall tells The Globe and Mail. In their article, authors Jeffrey Jones and Bill Curry discuss LEEFF, Canada’s newest package of emergency credit support, and how it is tied to the disclosure of climate risks. Andrew, who specializes in corporate governance, explains the implications.
“This is going to be a meaningful obligation for companies to take on as a condition to access any of these resources,” Andrew tells The Globe and Mail. “If you’re going to take on the support, you’re going to, essentially, really up your game in disclosure in a way that really doesn’t exist right now for the vast majority of companies.”
He adds that “numerous companies publish voluntary sustainability reports, with varying levels of disclosure.”
“They provide a limited amount of detail about what the company is doing,” Andrew tells The Globe and Mail. “They’re not done with a particular set of standards or guidelines to the disclosure, so in practice it can be a bit mixed.”
If you subscribe to The Globe and Mail online, read more in authors Jeffrey Jones and Bill Curry’s article “Ottawa’s aid package a climate-change signal to big corporations.”