Governance highlights

Read highlights about our ongoing commitment to corporate governance.

Building on our commitment to good governance

At TELUS, we are committed to high standards in corporate governance and are constantly evolving our practices and pursuing transparency and integrity in everything we do. We believe that strong corporate governance is the foundation for accountability to our shareholders and we strive to be at the forefront of governance best practices.

Best practices

Our long-standing best practices provide a foundation for TELUS to effectively pursue corporate governance excellence. See some of those practices below.

  • Independent Board and committees

  • Board diversity policy

  • Majority voting policy

  • Clawback policy

  • Say-on-pay vote

  • Shareholder engagement policy

  • Separate independent Chair of the Board and CEO positions

  • Code of ethics and conduct and EthicsLine

  • Privacy management program framework

  • Enterprise risk governance and oversight

  • Board recruitment process and orientation programs

  • Mandatory continuing education sessions for the Board

  • Limit on interlocking boards and number of public board directorships

  • Board and committee succession planning

  • CEO succession planning

  • Board, committee and director evaluations

  • Director term limits

  • Share ownership guidelines for directors and executives

Details on the above practices are in the Board policy manual and also available on the Corporate Policies section.

Pursuit of excellence

In 2019, we continued to advance our practices in pursuit of excellence and investor confidence.

0%

of independent directors are women

0%

of independent directors represent diversity

0%

in favour of election of our directors at our 2019 annual meeting

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say-on-pay approval at our 2019 annual meeting

Some of the initiatives we pursued in 2019 include:

  • Surpassed our Board diversity target of 30 per cent diverse members and 30 per cent of each gender - At the end of 2019, 55 per cent of our independent directors are diverse (six of all independent directors) and 45 per cent (five of all independent directors) are women

  • Demonstrated the effectiveness of our committee succession planning by rotating Stockwell Day to the Corporate Governance Committee and appointing Ray Chan as Chair of the Pension Committee after our annual meeting in May, to give directors the opportunity to serve on different committees and as a committee chair

  • Continued a comprehensive review of President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and executive succession planning, which included examining progress against prior high-potential development plans and discussing the strengths and development opportunities for the next generation of executive and CEO candidates

  • Conducted a comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness and performance of the Board, as well as a peer evaluation. We will conduct an independent review of our evaluation process in 2020

  • Nominated Tom Flynn for election to our Board at our 2020 annual meeting. Tom brings financial expertise and senior executive leadership to our Board

  • Approved our strategic plan, taking into account the opportunities and risks of each of our business units for the upcoming year.

For a full statement of TELUS corporate governance practices, please refer to the “Statement of TELUS’ corporate governance practices” in TELUS’ 2020 Information circular.