SUPPORTNG STATEMENT: According to an online survey by Léger Marketing and The Association for Canadian Studies for The Canadian Press in October 2022, 70% of Canadians are worried or very worried about climate change. The high percentage of votes cast in favour of our shareholder proposal last year reflects this concern in our country. This vote is also surely an expression of the shareholders’ questioning of the scope of the Bank’s environmental actions. The recent forest fires and floods of the past year are far from alleviating these concerns, and it is safe to assume that events such as those will only exacerbate them. CIBC PROXY CIRCULAR 103 Shareholder Proposals A recent report1 by Oxfam Québec on the carbon footprint of the country’s banking portfolios calls on shareholders to be more demanding about the efforts made by organizations. One of the report’s observations is noteworthy: “not only are none of the major Canadian banks committed, in either the short or medium term, to withdrawing from the fossil fuel sector, but they all persist in presenting as forming part of the energy transition and sustainable finance activities aimed either at decarbonizing the extraction, transformation and/or consumption processes of fossil fuels themselves, or at supporting the diversification of the ‘green’ asset portfolios of companies in this same sector, particularly in the fields of green technologies and renewable energies”. The report even describes their initiatives as relatively unambitious: “the C$850 billion pledged in total by BMO, RBC, Scotia, CIBC and TD for the period 2020-2030, for example, while not insignificant, will in the end represent only two thirds of the assets previously committed by them to fossil fuels between 2016 and 2020 alone, which exceeded C$1,300 billion”. We have little time left to clean up our environment and leave future generations a better place to live. It is therefore important for shareholders to be allowed to express their opinion on the scope of the actions our organizations wish to take over the next few years, and to push for greater proactivity. It bears noting that in France, a draft legislation2 on “say on climate” would require all listed companies to submit their “climate and sustainability” strategy to their shareholders every three years, or in the event of a significant change.