How the Protesters Can Seize the Moment

If they are to evoke change, Canada's 'Occupy' movement needs concrete goals.

Thousands of Canadians plan to gather this weekend to begin demonstrating on Bay St. in Toronto, and in other cities across the country, to express concern about bank and corporate irresponsibility and broader accountability issues. The planned protests are not only joining the Occupy Wall Street movement gaining momentum in the United States, but are also joining a movement that has been active and growing for almost 15 years here in Canada.

In 1996-97, more than 100 citizen organizations from across Canada, with a collective membership of more than three million Canadians, came together in the Canadian Community Reinvestment Coalition. A few years later, more than 30 organizations formed the Corporate Responsibility Coalition. Since then, these two nationwide coalitions have been successful in pushing for important accountability measures, including: requirements that banks and other financial institutions disclose more details about their lending and service records annually (this is the first sector to be required to do this in Canada); the creation of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada regulatory organization; consumer protections against banks’ gouging; measures that make it easier to hold corporate executives accountable for crimes committed by their employers, and that make it illegal to retaliate against employees who blow the whistle on corporate wrongdoing; and, finally, the initiation of measures that make the Competition Bureau more independent and effective.

However, in virtually every case, the federal or provincial government that made these changes left loopholes or built in flaws to undermine the effectiveness of the measures and enforcement agencies. And so the campaign continues for more effective measures, and enforcement of those measures, to ensure Canada’s big banks and big businesses act honestly, ethically, and openly.

Over the next several months, the Canadian government will be reviewing our country’s big banks and big businesses. This is an important opportunity for the nascent protest movement in Canada. As many commentators have pointed out, the current demonstrations are not advocating specific proposals for change, and, as a result, will not be as effective as they could be in pressing politicians and corporate executives to do anything that will actually address the protesters’ concerns. Demonstrators would be wise to join with the existing coalitions that share their concerns and consider pushing for the following key changes:

1) The government must require large corporations in every sector (including banks and other financial institutions) to contact individual shareholders and customers through emails or email notices, and invite them to join watchdog groups for a nominal annual membership fee of $30 to $40. Collectively, Canada’s big businesses have about 10 to 20 million shareholders and customers. If each sector had a five-per-cent response rate, we could see the creation of watchdog groups with 500,000 to one million members, and annual budgets of $15 to $40 million. Such groups should be run by boards elected by, and from, members, and should be charged with educating about, and advocating for, member concerns and fair consumer policies.

This method of forming and funding citizen watchdog groups (an idea originally put forth by political activist Ralph Nader) has been used successfully in the U.S., and has been endorsed by a federal task force, a federal House of Commons and Senate committee, and an Ontario parliamentary committee.

2) All corporations and financial institutions must be required to disclose records showing their compliance with laws, as well as key details about their business activities, in an online, searchable database so that members of the public have easy access to the information and can judge for themselves whether they want to do business with each company.

3) Regulatory agencies in each sector must be required to conduct frequent, random audits of all the activities of businesses – including their profit margins – to protect consumers against gouging. Currently, many regulators sit back and wait for complaints instead of proactively inspecting businesses in order to prevent problems.

4) Penalties for corporate wrongdoing must be increased. Currently, for example, the maximum penalty for violating the Bank Act is only $200,000, a meaningless penalty for banks that make more than $15 billion annually. Steeper penalties are needed if they are to curb unethical behaviour.

5) Finally, a complete and effective whistleblower-protection system must be created. We need a fully independent, fully empowered, and well-resourced agency to which complaints can be filed – an agency that has the power to fully protect those who report corporate wrongdoing from retaliation, and to effectively penalize retaliators.

Are there enough politicians across Canada who are interested in protecting the public that these changes will be implemented? Or will our politicians continue to protect Canada’s big banks and big businesses, failing to hold them accountable for wrongdoing, gouging, pollution, and other irresponsible actions? Demonstrators in the “Occupy” movement in Canada have an opportunity to coalesce around the concrete measures proposed above, and to achieve real change by addressing something that unifies their disparate concerns: the lack of corporate accountability in this country.

Photo courtesy of Reuters.