ESG standards is going to be a major consideration for investors...

ESG standards is going to be a major consideration for investors in the coming years, especially after IFRS has officially released their S1 and S2 standards. For those the uninitiated, the for-profit sector is going to be busy getting themselves ready to comply with the new Sustainability Reporting (SR) standards.

For example: the oil spill that was caused by BP in Gulf of Mexico (known as Deppwater Horizon incident). If SR standards had existed and were compulsory back then, investors would've known there's a risk of oil spill because at the time, BP didn't have a functional safety culture. In fact, they had been doing a series of cost-cutting prior to the incident. Under SR Standards, BP would've had to disclose this risk on their annual reports and investors would've made a different investment decision after factoring it in.

I'm not familiar with Canada's ESG reporting regime but I would've thought their private sector would be on the front foot as well because their public sector has to use IFRS as accounting standards, the same like Australia.