Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published, on the same day, a couple of interestingly contrasting opinion pieces.

The first, titled Small companies risk buckling under the burdens of mandatory sustainability reporting, was by Andrew McLaughlin. Here are some extracts:

• I’m a senior executive at a small company (under $1-billion market cap) that’s just gone through another annual wave of report preparation. It’s admittedly ever-more challenging to keep the reporting ship afloat. Here’s a brief snapshot of what this specifically entails for us:
• Beyond our normal day-to-day tasks, over the last few months our Sustainability Co-ordinator and I were once again charged with pulling together our annual sustainability report, management information circular, annual information form, and now for the first time under recently adopted federal legislation, our modern slavery report. While we received lots of input and support from our colleagues (many of whom are also stretched to keep up with quarterly financial reporting) and external advisers, it’s a far cry from having entire departments dedicated to these efforts.
• … I can point to various concrete examples where we’ve had to put implementation efforts on hold to focus on meeting pressing reporting deadlines. This happened most recently when my colleague (our Sustainability Co-ordinator) and I were leading the effort to establish a small group of field-level operations experts charged with identifying and implementing tangible and meaningful decarbonization initiatives on the ground across our 15 countries of operation. At the risk of losing some of the momentum, we ended up putting that effort on the side-burner temporarily to focus on getting our various pressing public disclosures past the finish line.
• While we remain fully supportive of the broader efforts to streamline and mandate sustainability reporting standards, it does present significant and unique challenges for smaller companies. To stay afloat in this new reality, part of the solution will be for smaller companies to increasingly leverage digital platforms. Many will need to rely further on external consultants.
• As we barrel toward the national implementation of the IFRS sustainability reporting requirements currently being considered by the Canadian Securities Administrators, it’s crucial that the small company reality be taken into account. And for those companies currently considering going public, this may serve as a useful reminder of some of the growing challenges involved in life as a reporting issuer.

The second article, titled How many LGBTQ+ corporate directors does Canada have? We investigated, was by Jane Griffith and Sarah Kaplan:

• Because no comprehensive data exist on the demographics of Canadian corporate board members, the Institute for Gender and the Economy in partnership with LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors Canada undertook a study to identify all of the 9,396 corporate directors of 1,110 companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange (those subject to diversity disclosure regulations for women on boards) from 2015-2022. We then painstakingly searched newspapers, biographies, the internet and other public sources for any mention of each director’s affiliation with the LGBTQ+ community.
• The depressing – but perhaps not surprising – result: we only could identify nine total board members across all years (and seven in 2022) who publicly identified as being part of the community. That’s just 0.15 per cent of total board members. Given that between 4.4 per cent and 9 per cent of the Canadian population are LGBTQ+, this number is shockingly low.
• … By excluding LGBTQ+ people from board leadership, unintentionally or not, boards are missing out on opportunities to be higher performing. Diverse boards have been shown to exercise more effective risk management, engage in deeper analysis, avoid group think and address environmental, social and governance issues with greater acuity.
• … Boards, and the search firms that support the process of attracting new board members, need to put in the work to seek out people who will contribute to the diversity of lived experiences represented in their midst. And then, of course, they will need to create a welcoming and respectful environment where LGBTQ+ board members can contribute their full knowledge and wisdom.

This struck me as an interesting juxtaposition of, very broadly speaking, a request for expectations placed on corporations to be scaled back versus a request for them to be ramped up. Of course, I’m not saying for a second that this represents a comparison of apples to apples (a dumb phrase, in any event). The first article is essentially a direct appeal to cost versus benefit considerations: an argument that while more sustainability-related disclosure about a particular company might almost always carry some incremental benefit for users of its financial information, that benefit might not be enough to outweigh the cost of producing it (including, as argued above, the opportunity cost of foregone value-added activity). In contrast, the second article seems really to be indicating a pool of consistently under-tapped benefit with little offsetting cost (leaving aside the expense of engaging suitable search firms and the like). Of course, the demonstrated benefits of diverse boards as a whole can’t translate into asserting that any given board will automatically benefit from taking on any given LGBTQ+ person: for example, the kind of different thinking (if any) the person brings might be irrelevant or even counterproductive to the company’s success (the same kind of points made here in a different context). But regardless, the coincidence of the two opinion pieces reminds us that improvements in corporate reporting and governance don’t simply follow a straight line: something that seems plainly beneficial on its face may at the very least require more detailed consideration; a conventional focus on compliance and regulation may overlook other aspects of potential growth and evolution that may ultimately carry greater, if less readily quantified, benefit…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.