MONTREAL — Canadian National has hired a Montreal-based search firm to help find a French-speaking member for its board of directors, the railroad has announced.
The announcement came as part of a Friday statement announcing the election of a new board chairwoman and 10 other board members.
New board chairwoman Shauneen Bruder said the railroad intends to appoint a francophone and Quebec-based director “in the coming months.
“CN takes this process very seriously,” Bruder said in the statement. “It will be rigorous, of the highest integrity, and consistent with our principles of best-in-class governance.”
The lack of a French-speaking board member has been criticized by Canada’s Transport Minister, Omar Alghabra, and raised the possibility of a protest in board voting by Quebec pension agency Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec [see “Quebec pension fund may protest …,” Trains News Wire, May 16, 2022].
The Montreal Gazette reports that lack of a francophone board member led the Société Saint-Jean-Baptist de Montreal, which promotes Quebec francophone interests and sovereignty, to place a giant lemon in front of CN headquarters on Friday to protest the railroad’s lack of respect for the French language.
Marie-Anne Alepin, the society’s president, said the absence of a French speaker at CN’s highest levels “shows contempt for francophones.”
Re Mr Blaubach’s comments, from my experience a lot of board members of other companies are also not necessarily the best qualified.
Also when Air Canada was privatized it was a requirement that the head office stay in Montreal despite the fact that Toronto is by far Air Canada’s busiest station.
Also, Americans may not be aware of letter writer Roger Burrows. He has written a number of books on railroads. Great stuff.
The real issue here is that CN’s HQ is held hostage in Montreal, Quebec, by the Canadian Government. This was a political requirement of CN’s privatization in the 1990s.
I sent the following letter to the editor of the Globe & Mail last month. A slightly modified version was printed in the newspaper on April 29th.
Re: CN Rail under fire for failing to nominate francophones as directors (Globe April 22)
One year in the late 1990s, CN held their Annual Meeting in Vancouver. As a shareholder I attended and asked then-CEO Paul Tellier that since the majority of the Company’s traffic and earnings were in Western Canada, did he think it appropriate that the Company’s head office was held hostage in Montreal by the Canadian Government. Naturally, as a former civil servant and Quebecker, he didn’t properly answer the question.
Since then, CN has grown substantially, adding several US railroads and the British Columbia Railway to its system. But the head office remains in Montreal, by federal government edict. Now, the Quebec Caisse wants more francophone directors.
I remain a shareholder and I’m fine with nominees from BNSF and UP railroads. For its members, I’d think that the Caisse should also prefer industry-savvy directors, rather than some form of forced linguisity.
Canadian Pacific moved its head office from Montreal to Calgary in 1996. It is unfortunate that CN cannot do something similar.
Roger Burrows
Let Quebec secede.. I’m sure the rest of Canada would appreciate not having the leach of a province anyhow…
They may be stubborn, but they aren’t dumb. They make up for their political and linguistic minority by using their pension funds to acquire leverage. Most Canadian companies have a significant investment by one or many Quebec based pension funds. Recently one of the funds bought a controlling interest in a transit system.
When Bombardier couldn’t get the markets to support their C Series aircraft, it was the Quebec pension funds that doubled down. Even after the spinoff to Airbus and renamed the A220, as a now minority owner they recently invested yet more CDN into the HQ at Mirabel to increase production. (its a great plane BTW)
More BS in the name of “equality”. When will they mandate the total elimination of spoken English?
+1
Whatever happened to having the best qualified people serving on their board of directors without regard to ancestry, ethnicity, race, sex, etc.?
Caisse de Depot & Placement du Quebec owns 1.69% of CN and are the largest mutual fund shareholder. They also own 1.74% shares outright. So that equates to about 3.43% of voting power.
Melinda French Gates is the largest individual shareholder at 1.57% when the shares with Bill Gates were split post divorce.
The largest shareholder en masse is TCI at 5.24%.
RBC owns 2.56%.
Several Canadian bank dividend funds own collectively about 2.5%
CN’s operating hub is Chicagoland, where the dominant languages are English and Spanish.
The problem Charles is HQ is in Montreal and not Chicago.
And there is a bill before the Quebec Legislature right now, Bill 69, which is trying to reinforce the use of the French language in Quebec.
Bill 69 should have minimal impact on CN but it will make like much more difficult for any Anglophone.