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 2020, we continued to advance our practices in pursuit of excellence and investor confidence.

0%

of independent directors are women

0%

in favour of election of our directors at our 2020 annual meeting

0%

say-on-pay approval at our 2020 annual meeting

Some of the recent initiatives we pursued include:

  • Updated our Board diversity policy to confirm the importance of diversity and the attributes the Board is seeking for its composition, which now includes separate diversity targets of having (a) at least two directors who represent a visible minority or are Indigenous by the annual meeting in 2023 and (b) women and men each represent at least one-third of independent directors

  • Updated our director skills matrix to include new skill attributes of corporate social responsibility, corporate development and international experience, reflecting the importance of having environmental, social and governance-related expertise on our Board and the changing nature of TELUS’ business

  • Surpassed our Board diversity target for gender as 45 per cent of our current independent directors are women (five of our independent directors)

  • Recruited two new nominees who will further strengthen our Board by bringing expertise in corporate social responsibility, human resources management and executive compensation, finance and accounting, governance, international experience and senior executive leadership

  • Acted to enhance the diversity of our Board such that our 2021 director nominees include two individuals who identify as members of a visible minority and one who identifies as Indigenous

  • Continued a comprehensive review of President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and executive succession planning with the assistance of an external consultant, Korn Ferry, 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

  • Engaged Deloitte LLP to conduct an independent and comprehensive assessment of the effectiveness and performance of the Board, our committees, each committee chair and the Board Chair, as well as a peer assessment

For a full statement of TELUS corporate governance practices, please refer to the “Statement of TELUS’ corporate governance practices” in TELUS’ 2021 Information circular.