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 2022, we continued to advance our practices in pursuit of excellence and investor confidence.

99%

in favour of election of our directors at our 2022 annual meeting

100%

of our Board diversity targets were exceeded in 2022

93%

say-on-pay approval at our 2022 annual meeting

Some of the recent initiatives we pursued include:

  • Our directors formally evaluate the effectiveness of the Board and its committees, as well as the performance of all individual directors (including the Board Chair and committee chairs) on an annual basis. Similar to previous years, our Board engaged an external advisor to conduct an assessment of the effectiveness and performance of our Board, as well as to oversee a peer assessment. In 2022, the Board engaged Egon Zehnder International Inc. and leveraged their assessment to inform our Chair succession planning process.
  • After the completion of a comprehensive Chair succession process led by the Corporate Governance Committee, on February 10, 2023, TELUS announced that Dick Auchinleck will retire at the close of our 2023 annual meeting of shareholders and that The Honourable John Manley will become Chair of the Board immediately following the meeting, assuming his re-election as a director at the meeting.
  • We surpassed our Board diversity policy targets again for gender, as 43 per cent of our current independent directors are women (six of our independent directors), and for visible minority or Indigenous Peoples representation, as two of our current directors identify as members of a visible minority and one identifies as Indigenous. Of our current director nominees, six nominees are women, two nominees identify as members of a visible minority and one identifies as Indigenous.
  • We considered the role of our Board committees in overseeing climate and sustainability issues and commitments, resulting in clarifications to the Audit Committee’s role in oversight of climate-related financial disclosure. The Audit Committee’s terms of reference were updated to include the review of any metrics regarding climate-related risks, sustainability and environmental disclosure in financial reporting, while the Corporate Governance Committee remains responsible for reviewing and monitoring TELUS’ overall approach, planning and reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainability matters.
  • The name of the Human Resources and Compensation Committee was amended to the People, Culture and Compensation Committee to better reflect the committee’s mandate and values.
For a full statement of TELUS corporate governance practices, please refer to the
Statement of TELUS’ corporate governance practices
 in TELUS’ 2023 Information circular.