CEO’s Letter Accompanying the Report on Corporate social Responsibility of Canadian Listed Firms: An Analysis of the Content and the Links with Some of the Firms’ Characteristics

Abstract : The disclosure of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) by Canadian firms is not mandatory. This provides an ideal context to describe the nature of what is being freely disclosed by large firms and to study the firms’ characteristics which lead to such disclosure. We searched all TSX listed firms to find those which disclose a CSR report accompanied by a letter from the CEO. In the end, we study 89 CEO’s letters; that is, all the firms disclosing both a CSR report and a CEO’s letter. We first looked at the nature of the elements disclosed. We classified them in 3 categories: (1) actual accomplishments in the field of CSR, (2) values and (3) future objectives. The «actual accomplishments» is the category with the fewest elements disclosed (proportionally to all the elements that we identified as potentially disclosed in this category) while the category «values» is the one with the most elements. On average, less than 50% of the elements we identified as possibly disclosed were actually discussed in the CEO’s letters. We also looked at the relationship between the level of disclosure and some of the characteristics of the firms. We found that only the variables «profitability» and «sectors of activities» are significantly related. This is obviously an exploratory research which will be followed by a study of the Corporate Social Report and the relationship between the report itself and the elements found in the CEO’s letter.