Sunita Malepati’s commentary describes how number of minority shareholders brought suit against a family-owned supermarket, Market Basket, with a history of treating employees and other stakeholders well. A group of minority shareholders had offered to sell their shares to a third party, and CEO Arthur T. Demoulas resisted, arguing that the shareholders could not sell their stock if it would imperil the corporation’s tax status. The original opinion found that the shareholders could sell their shares to whom they pleased, regardless of how it might impact the corporation. The feminist judgment rejects the original opinion, applying a feminist ethic-of-care lens and embracing a feminist-informed stakeholder theory of corporate governance. Rather than replicating the shareholder primacy model’s privileging of shareholder-owners, the feminist judgment vindicates the interests of the corporation’s employee-stakeholders and community the corporation serves—each ethnically and socioeconomically diverse groups.

In Canadian corporate law, shareholders occupy a preferential role vis-à-vis other stakeholders. Shareholders are the only stakeholder with statutory rights, such as the right to elect and remove directors. Against this backdrop, this chapter examines the Canadian corporate governance landscape from the perspective of shareholders and examines the legal and market tools that shareholders have available to them. This chapter also explores the limitations and effectiveness of these mechanisms and considers various market actors who influence shareholder behaviour and can facilitate shareholder engagement. The chapter concludes with an analysis of three trends in shareholder engagement in Canada: (i) institutional investor engagement on issues at the core of ESG; (ii) the role of proxy advisory firms and the influence they wield over institutional shareholders; and (iii) the immediate  impact of COVID-19 on shareholder engagement.