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From my vantage point, looking over the battlefield, there is some chance that Bill C-25 could be sent back to the House of Commons, a move that would mark a rare corporate victory.

Introduced by Navdeep Bains, federal minister of innovation, science and economic development, the bill stages two destructive attacks on the corporate model. The first storms straight up through the shareholder-democracy ranks by forcing companies to hold annual elections of individual directors. The second attack swoops in from the top. The government, through Bill C-25, is fighting to impose “diversity” on boards of directors and top corporate management.

The idea that corporations are democracies and should be reformulated along the lines of condo corporations has been around for some time. In the U.S. in the 1970s, Ralph Nader led an early campaign to turn boards into elected governments in charge of legislating businesses, which would also have to submit all “major transactions” to shareholder plebiscites. In Nader’s model, the shareholders are electors who choose directors who in turn select the executives who then submit major decisions to a shareholder vote.

This bastard version of the corporate model, which is based on Nader’s view that public corporations are creatures of the state, is at the heart of Bill C-25. The claim, among others, is that the boards of corporations under current CBCA rules are populated by large numbers of aging white “zombie” directors who are mindless and incompetent stooges for management, kept in place without popular shareholder support. The proposed solution is to turn shareholders into populist electors who, at times, could cast ballots for competing directors, who would campaign on different ideological agendas. Shareholders, including public pension giants, could also nominate their own directors for election. The Ontario condo act follows the same structure.