SUPPORTING STATEMENT: Since 2020, the year when annual meetings were first held in virtual mode due to health restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have expressed numerous concerns about the conduct of these meetings.1 The OECD Principles of Governance read as follows: “[...] due care is required to ensure that remote meetings do not decrease the possibility for shareholders to engage with and ask questions to boards and management in comparison to physical meetings. Some jurisdictions have issued guidance to facilitate the conduct of remote meetings, including for handling shareholder questions, responses and their disclosure, with the objective of ensuring transparent consideration of questions by boards and management, including how questions are collected, combined, answered and disclosed. Such guidance may also address how to deal with technological disruptions that may impede virtual access to meetings.”2 Virtual meetings certainly offer benefits that we do acknowledge, but they shouldn’t obviate the need for faceto-face meetings. As Teachers’ does,3 we believe that annual shareholder meetings should be held in person, with virtual meetings added as a complement (in hybrid format, as all banks did in 2023), without replacing inperson meetings. It is understood that all shareholders should enjoy the same rights, regardless of whether they participate in person or remotely. This position is supported by several organizations, including the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance (CCGG)4 and numerous major institutional investors.