Vancity Investment Management (VCIM), Vancity’s wealth management subsidiary, is the sub-adviser managing IA Clarington’s Inhance series mutual funds, which many Vancity members hold in their investment (SWM) portfolios. VCIM also manages portfolios for private and institutional clients. This enables VCIM to engage, often with like-minded partners, the companies whose stocks are held in these funds and portfolios, on behalf of members and clients, in seven key impact areas: biodiversity and nature; climate, energy and just transition; financial resilience and diversity, equity, inclusion, and Reconciliation; governance and disclosure; health care; human capital management; and human rights.
Engagement takes different forms, from filing proposals at companies’ Annual General Meetings to working directly with a company’s executive leadership behind the scenes. In a typical year, VCIM could have over 40 engagements with 20-30 individual companies.
In 2023, for example, VCIM filed new proposals with TD Canada Trust, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and Royal Bank of Canada, requesting that these banks disclose their CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio, having already achieved such disclosure from the Bank of Nova Scotia and Canada Pacific Kansas City (CP Rail) in 2022. These disclosures help assess whether the value generated by these large employers is improving income disparities and inequalities or making them worse.
