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

International audience; 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 «a…