Corporate Governance

Four Pillars framework

At Ontario Teachers’, accountability for responsible investing extends throughout the organization. It starts with our internal governance and extends to our external partners. To remain accountable, we have Four Pillars of effective board governance.

Read our Corporate Governance Principles and Proxy Voting Guidelines

Our corporate governance principles

Each pillar is underpinned by one or more corporate governance principles:

People

Effective boards are made up of diverse individuals with the relevant experience and skills to challenge management and execute their oversight duties.

Structure

Effective boards have strong independent leadership with the appropriate size to ensure the right breadth and depth of oversight. We also encourage the delegation of work to committees to be more efficient.

Practice

Effective boards establish robust assessment and recruitment practices and provide honest and constructive oversight of management.

Culture

Effective boards have a strong culture rooted in respectful relationships, transparent dialogue, independence.

Proxy voting: An important voice

Proxy voting is an important way shareholders can exercise influence and control over their investments in public companies. Electing directors, appointing auditors and having a say on executive compensation are three ways we use our vote to hold public companies accountable for their governance practices.

We also vote on shareholder proposals, which are usually target a specific outcome, such as creating a sustainability report, achieving pay equity or disclosing lobbying and political expenditures.

We consider each vote carefully using a number of important factors when making a vote decision:

Our Corporate Governance Principles and Proxy Voting Guidelines
Our thematic focus areas, such as climate change and diversity
What we’ve learned from our engagement with the company and from our process for monitoring our investments
Trends identified through our analysis of previous voting and other relevant voting patterns
Relevant company filings and research materials
What’s in the best interests of shareholders for achieving long-term success

Each year we review our proxy voting practices as well as new thinking in corporate governance, market developments and other significant events to uncover emerging corporate governance trends and issues.

Interested in how we vote?

For transparency, we publish voting decisions and rationale before each shareholder meeting. You can review our voting record in the link below.

This section of the site shows how we intend to vote our proxies in response to solicitations by either the management of the companies in which we own voting shares, or others. It is intended only to provide information to plan members, co-sponsors of the plan and others. We urge all investors to conduct their own evaluations of these issues and to arrive at decisions that best meet their own investment objectives. By providing our decisions on this site, we do not intend to solicit the proxy of any other shareholders nor do we request any other shareholders to execute, not execute or revoke the proxies that have by solicited by management or anyone else.

View Proxy Voting Database*

*By clicking this link you will be leaving the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan site and going to a third-party site. That site may have legal and privacy policies that are different from those of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan assumes no liability or responsibility for the content, accuracy, operation or failure to operate, or any material contained or linked on the third-party website.

Good governance is good business