Sunrise: A song of many humans  – A brief history The Ontario Public Sector Salary Disclosure (“PSSD”), colloquially known as the “Sunshine List”, has just been released for the 2025 year. Before too long, there will be numerous articles about its size, usefulness, and its long history (almost 30 years old!). The dawn of the Sunshine List came about in the mid-90s, as part of then premier Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution”. The idea was that a public list of high governm

In late 2025, the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance (“CCGG”) announced updates to its guidance around the subject of executive compensation, the first major update to its policies since 2013. The new Executive and Director Compensation Guidebook   re-organizes and expands on CCGG’s six principles from 2013 to provide more detailed and up-to-date guidance on how to structure executive and Board compensation.   While CCGG itself notes that “it is difficult to espouse compe

Beyond the Headlines The gender pay gap remains one of the most scrutinized measures of workplace equity in Canada. In 2024, Statistics Canada reported that the ratio between female and male median wages is 90% ¹ and that this gap widens at the executive level, where female executives earn roughly 40% less  in total compensation relative to male executives.² These numbers make great fodder for headlines, but do they tell the whole story? Figure 1: Gender compensation gap (me

Say-on-pay voting has become a common governance and risk-mitigation mechanism globally in executive compensation, and is mandatory for public companies in several jurisdictions, including the United States. Say-on-pay provides shareholders with the opportunity to vote on whether they approve of a company’s executive compensation practices. Depending on the jurisdiction, the vote may be binding (i.e. requiring the company to follow the outcome) or non-binding (i.e. advisory).