{"id":17091,"date":"2020-04-29T12:19:45","date_gmt":"2020-04-29T17:19:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rsslex.com\/publications\/companies-may-hold-remote-meetings-despite-governing-documents\/"},"modified":"2025-03-04T10:28:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T15:28:56","slug":"20200429_companies-may-hold-remote-meetings-despite-governing-documents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rsslex.com\/en\/bulletins-en\/20200429_companies-may-hold-remote-meetings-despite-governing-documents\/","title":{"rendered":"Companies May Hold Remote Meetings, Despite Governing Documents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- \n\n\n<p><strong>By <a href=\"..\/team\/sharon-g-druker\/\">Sharon G. Druker<\/a>, from our Business Law Practice Group<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n --><\/p>\n<p><!-- April 29, 2020\u00a0\u2014  -->By press release dated April 27, 2020, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Qu\u00e9bec announced that for the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency, legal persons who must hold meetings of their boards of directors, shareholders (in the case of a corporation) and members (in the case of non-profit organizations) can do so remotely, even if their governing documents require in-person attendance or actually prohibit participation in meetings by technological means. This includes corporations, non-profit legal persons governed by Part III of the <em>Companies Act<\/em> (Quebec), cooperatives (for both annual and special meetings), partnerships, syndicates of co-owners, professional orders, the council of commissioners of a school board and the governing board of an elementary or high school.<\/p>\n<p>Generally speaking, such technological means must include the use of equipment by the participants which enable all of them to hear each other (<em>e.g.,<\/em> conference call or video-conference) and must permit voting and the recording of the results. Where a secret vote is required, it can be held by any agreed-upon method of communication, failing which it can be held by any method which permits the collection of ballots for subsequent verification and which preserves the secrecy of the votes.<\/p>\n<p>Similar measures have been adopted across Canada in the various provinces and territories. This is however only a temporary solution, and all organizations of every nature who are required to hold meetings should seize this opportunity to update their governing documents (constitution, by-laws, agreement, etc.) to specifically permit meetings held by technological means and to set out the requirements for the meeting to be held and for those \u201cin attendance\u201d to participate.<\/p>\n<p><!-- \n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rsslex.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/20200429_Corporate-meetings.pdf\">Click here for a PDF version<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By press release dated April 27, 2020, the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Qu\u00e9bec announced that for the duration of the COVID-19 public health emergency, legal persons who must hold meetings of their boards of directors, shareholders (in the case of a corporation) and members (in the case of non-profit organizations) can do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-law-en","category-bulletins-en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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