A Canadian Response to the Pursuit of Global Sustainability Reporting Standards*

As business, government, and society continue to emphasize the importance of sustainability—both of individual organizations and of the natural world—accounting standard-setting bodies want to be part of the process. In September 2020, in response to “urgent and growing demand” for more “consistent and comparable” sustainability reporting, the IFRS Foundation (the Foundation) released for comment a Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting. In the paper, the Foundation proposed the creation of a Sustainability Standards Board (SSB), which it would oversee alongside the IASB. The SSB would become, de facto, the global sustainability reporting standard setter. The Foundation received 577 responses to its proposal. These responses came from around the world and from a wide range of stakeholders. Thirty-eight of the responses came from Canada. This study profiles the Canadian responses, contrasting them with the wider set of worldwide responses. Some uniquely Canadian features include user responses from a large number of pension funds and preparer responses solely from the energy sector. There was also a significant response from the Canadian accounting community, including from the full set of Canadian standard-setting organizations. Five auditors general also responded. Overall, Canadian respondents supported both globalized sustainability reporting standards and the Foundation's creation of the SSB. This support aligns Canada's response with the worldwide response.     

Contributions to Canadian economic history: The last 30 years

The cliometric revolution that transformed economic history in the US in the 1960s was soon embraced by Canadian economic historians. Many of the important issues surrounding Canadian development remained the same: the role of resources, the place of international trade, immigration, capital accumulation and interactions with Native Americans, among others. But beginning in the 1960s, and certainly over the last 30 years, economic historians of Canada have addressed them with the tools of modern economics, both theoretical and empirical. We highlight the recent work emphasizing not just the methods but also the fundamental ways our understanding of Canadian history has been changed.     

New directions in business cycle research and financial analysis

This paper serves as a partial introduction to and survey of the literature on Markov-switching models. We review the history of this class of models, describe their mathematical structure, and exposit the basic ideas behind estimation and inference. The paper also describes how the approach can be extended in a variety of directions, such as non-Gaussian distributions, time-varying transition probabilities, vector processes, state-space and GARCH models, and surveys recent methodological advances. The contributions of the other papers in this volume are reviewed. A final section offers conclusions and implications for policy. First Version Received: August 2001/Final Version Received: October 2001