Good afternoon. I would like to welcome everyone to the Corus Entertainment 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders. I will now turn the meeting over to Ms. Heather Shaw, Executive Chair of Corus Entertainment. Thank you and welcome, everyone. I am Heather Shaw, Executive Chair of Corus Entertainment, and with me today are Doug Murphy, President and CEO, and Sabah Mirza, Executive Vice President and General Counsel. In these unprecedented times, we have moved to a virtual-only format this year to mitigate risk to the health and safety of all meeting participants. For those shareholders that logged in with a control number, instructions will appear on your screen about how to ask questions, and for Class A voting shareholders, the voting procedure will also appear. Holders of Class B non-voting shares will not see this voting screen. Shareholders or proxy holders who entered the meeting with a control number may submit questions in writing at any time during the meeting by following the instructions in your web portal. We will respond to questions received on each matter of formal business at the time it comes before the meeting if it pertains to the business of the meeting. When the polls for all resolutions are opened and you are asked to vote, you will receive a message on the virtual interface requesting you to register your votes. You will only have a certain amount of time to do so when the polls are open. If you have voted your shares prior to the start of the meeting, your vote has been received by the scrutineers, and there is no need to vote those shares during the meeting unless you wish to revoke or change your vote. We have been advised by AST Trust Company (Canada) that based on the proxies already deposited with them, enough votes have been cast to carry each of the motions. As with any virtual technology, unexpected glitches may occur, but our service providers for this platform at Lumi are on standby to help. Refer to the links from the navigation menu for assistance. We will now proceed to the official business of the meeting. I call to order this annual meeting of shareholders. In accordance with the bylaws of the corporation, I will ask Sabah Mirza to act as Secretary of the meeting, and I will chair the meeting. AST Trust Company will act as scrutineers. The corporation has adopted the notice-and-access method of delivering materials to both registered and non-registered shareholders. As such, Corus mailed a notice to all shareholders of record as of November 23rd, 2020, and to each director and the auditors. The corporation has posted copies of the notice and management information circular, and the corporation's 2020 annual report on the meeting documents website for this meeting, on the company's website, and on SEDAR. Copies of the management information circular together with the annual report have also been posted on the Lumi platform. We have received a statutory declaration from the company's transfer agent attesting to the proper mailing of the notice of this meeting and accompanying materials. A copy of these documents will be kept as part of the records of the meeting. The scrutineer's report will now be read. I am pleased to read that the scrutineers, AST Trust Company (Canada), report that there are 29 shareholders holding 3,258,428 Class A voting shares represented in person or by proxy at this meeting. This total represents 95.49% of the 3,412,392 issued and outstanding Class A voting shares. A quorum is present, and I now declare the meeting duly called and properly constituted. The minutes of the last annual meeting of shareholders of the company have been posted to the Lumi platform and are available for review. Class A shareholders and any other shareholder that has entered the meeting with a control number may address the meeting when there is a call to discuss a motion before the meeting. Should you wish to address the Chair on any motion, please type in your question or comment in the message section once it opens during the discussion period. If there is any discussion or question pertaining to the motion, the secretary will read the question aloud. We'll now move to the formal business of the meeting. Certain of these items will be the subject of a vote by the Class A voting shareholders. All matters before this meeting must be approved by not less than a majority of the votes cast by Class A shareholders present in person at this meeting or voting by proxy. In accordance with the statute and bylaws governing Corus, we will conduct the votes on the matters before us by a poll. On a poll, every shareholder entitled to vote on the matter has one vote in respect of each share entitled to be voted on the matter and held by that shareholder. The electronic poll will be opened for all resolutions at the same time. This will allow you to choose to vote on each resolution immediately or wait until conclusion of discussion on each resolution prior to casting your vote. As previously noted, if you have already voted on a particular resolution by proxy, any vote that you cast through the Lumi platform on the particular resolution will revoke your proxy. I now present to the meeting the audited consolidated financial statements of Corus Entertainment Inc. for the year ended August 31st, 2020, and the report of the auditors on them. Copies of each document are included in the annual report made available to shareholders on the Lumi platform, on the meeting documents website for this meeting, and posted on the company's website and on SEDAR, and no further approval is necessary. We shall now open the electronic polls for all resolutions and proceed with the first item of business, the election of directors of the company. The company did not receive notice of any director nominations in connection with this meeting within the time prescribed by the advance notice requirements in the company's bylaws. Accordingly, at this meeting, the only persons eligible to be nominated for election to the board are the persons nominated by management as set out in the management information circular. Class A shareholders are being asked to elect the directors of the company to serve until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed or until they otherwise cease to hold office. I now call for someone to propose the nominees named in the company's management information circular to be elected as directors of the company. Madam Chair, I am Cathy Roozen, and I nominate as directors of the company for the ensuing year those persons described in the management information circular that was sent with the notice of this meeting, namely Fernand Bélisle, Michael Boychuk, Alex Carloss, Stephanie Coyles, Michael D'Avella, Sameer Deen, Mark Hollinger, Barry James, Doug Murphy, Heather Shaw, and Julie Shaw. Are there any comments on this nomination? I declare the nominations closed, and we will now move to the individual election of our directors by poll. I have been advised by the scrutineers that a significant majority of the proxies received by management prior to the meeting have been voted for the election of each of the persons nominated to serve as directors. As a reminder, Class A shareholders who have not already voted by proxy will now have the opportunity to enter their votes in the Lumi platform. If you have already provided voting instructions or submitted a proxy, you do not need to vote on this matter. Please proceed with entering your votes. We will now pause to allow the casting of the votes. The final item of business is the appointment of auditors, authorization for the directors to fix their remuneration. May I please have a motion? Madam Chair, I am John Gossling, and I move that Ernst & Young LLP be appointed auditors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until a successor is appointed, and that the directors be authorized to fix their remuneration. Madam Chair, I am Cathy Roozen, and I second the motion. You have heard the resolution. Are there any comments on the motion? Class A shareholders who had not already voted by proxy will now have the opportunity to enter their votes in the Lumi platform. If you have already provided voting instructions or submitted a proxy, you do not need to vote on this matter. Please proceed with entering your votes. We will be closing the polls on all motions shortly. We will pause now to allow for the casting of votes. The polls are now closed with respect to voting on all of the motions. We will pause while we wait for our scrutineers to confirm the counting of the votes. Our scrutineers have confirmed that all votes have been counted. The pre-preliminary results of voting are as follows. Our scrutineers have confirmed that all 11 persons named in the management information circular and nominated at this meeting have been individually elected as directors of the company to hold office for a term to expire immediately following the next annual meeting of shareholders or until their successors are elected or appointed or they otherwise cease to hold office. Our scrutineers have also confirmed that the motion to appoint Ernst & Young LLP as auditors of the company to hold office until the next annual meeting of shareholders or until a successor is appointed and that the directors be authorized to fix their remuneration has been carried. The final report on voting results provided by the scrutineer after the meeting will be incorporated into the minutes of the meeting. After the meeting, we will also post the final voting results on the investor relations page on the company's website, and we'll file the results on SEDAR. Before we conclude the formal business of the meeting, we'd like to take this opportunity to thank the board of directors for the support and guidance in this difficult and unusual year. In particular, we'd like to thank departing board member Cathy Roozen for her friendship and unswerving support over the last 20- years, along with her pragmatic outlook and sage advice. Thank you, Cathy. We'll now run a short video tribute to the founder of Corus, the late J.R. Shaw. Drive in his entrepreneurship, created Capital Cable at the time, which ended up becoming Shaw Communications. He created a strong, dominant Western family corporation business and a family enterprise. I first met J.R. in 2002, and as I put my hand out to shake his, he said to me, "Are you Joe's boy?" To which I replied, "Yes." In a magical bit of symmetry, it turns out that my father, who died when I was a teenager, was the principal investment banker working with J.R. to go public with Capital Cable in 1972. Everything that we've touched, you know, from my dad to my brother to myself, is kind of family-oriented. Why it's family is, you know, you treat others like you wanna be treated yourself. You know, you hire the people that's the best, and they make you look good, and you give them the credit. That relationship, I think is just was natural to have. He has a lot of integrity, and as a Shaw person, you know, we strive for integrity. He does have a wonderful sense of listening. I really learned a lot, and I went on the road with him a few times. Really everything was a handshake deal and, you know, everything's word of mouth. What people said about J.R. was that, A, he had great people around him. He recognized talent, and he was not afraid to go and hire the best talent, and he gave those people the responsibilities to make decisions. He wanted to build a top-notch communications company. He wanted to grow the company, and he wanted the company to survive. The only thing I think you can do by yourself is maybe play tennis and play golf, as two examples, but everything else, it takes teamwork. It takes people. The better the people you got, with the right attitude, the right work ethics, and somebody's got an idea, let's work on it. Somebody else has got ideas and, you know, everybody gets credit for it. Everybody, you know, is rewarded in that, in that way. Well, J.R.'s legacy is huge. He not only dominates the western part of this country, but he had a great influence with a lot of people. He was charitable. He was known as a man who listened and who thought a lot about what he was gonna say before he said it. He was just a really good guy. J.R. was driven to grow the company, and he was driven to be the best at what we could do. When we talked about customer service, he didn't wanna have token customer service, and he described it. He wanted to have services that customers wanted when they wanted it. He wanted to put smiles on the faces of our employees, but also smiles on the faces of our customers. J.R. was a teacher. He taught me three lessons which I'll never forget. The first one was to surround yourself with the best people that you wanna go to battle with each and every day, people that are very talented, that are very loyal, and that you enjoy very much. The second was have an eagle-eye focus on paying down your bank debt. Always de-leverage the balance sheet. J.R., rest assured, we'll continue to do so in the years ahead. The third one was work your butt off, but don't forget the sanctity of family. Family first. J.R. always thought content was king, I know that's been coined many times, but he really did. We started out small, like we bought DMX, a music service, as a content. We created the Home Network. We bought up or acquired small portions of YTV, I think we were 1 of 5 groups in the beginning, created Treehouse, bought a portion of Teletoon. Gradually we were able to acquire a lump and had a real strength in children's programming, and that's kinda was the beginning of Corus, was the roots of that, along with radio. Over the years he would always tell me, "I'm a builder. We're gonna build great things together." The culmination of that ambition was when we put Shaw Media and Corus Entertainment together to create today's new Corus Entertainment, a company with the scope and scale to compete and win in this tremendously disruptive but ripe with opportunity media landscape. You have to be ready, but you don't know what's really coming all the time, but if you have a strong balance sheet, you have good people, you have a good company, you're working hard, you know, that vision of an eagle and the work ethics of a plow horse, you know, all come into play a little bit to take advantage of opportunities. He said this often to all of us, never leave a table you can't return to. To me, that speaks of honesty, integrity, how you deal with people and how you treat people, because that was a very strong value. He made friends high and low all over the place just with the way he interrelated with them and how he cared. Dream of something that's a little bit beyond what you can see and so forth, of what if. I would like to extend my thanks to Heather Shaw, our Executive Chair, and our Board of Directors for their continued support and guidance. I would also like to thank our team members throughout the company who this year demonstrated impressive commitment and resiliency as we adeptly responded to the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and worked together to deliver on our strategic plan and financial priorities with great results. Finally, our entire team would like to thank you, our shareholders, for your support of Corus as we work to deliver on our long-term plan and build for the future. We will now address the questions received during the meeting that relate to Corus' business and that did not relate to the formal motions. We have received a few questions. Two of them pertain to the radio division. I'll read both questions and then turn it over to you, Doug. As the radio division now represents less than 10% of Corus, what is the company's long-term view on this business and will the company invest more in this division? The second question, the radio division of Corus represents less than 10% of the corporation. With the proposed radio review coming this year, is Corus considering purchasing additional radio assets or considering divesting existing radio assets? Thank you for your questions. We like the radio business, even though it is now less than 10% of our total company revenues. It is very strategic for our business, complementary the AM talk to our Global News product. We're very proud of the fact that we have top rock and roll stations in both Vancouver and Toronto, the biggest English language markets in the country. As you know, there is a CRTC radio policy review this year, which we will await to see the expected increased flexibility for the industry. Finally, we expect a very strong recovery in our radio business post-COVID. The short answer is we still like radio and we'll await with interest the outcome of the radio policy review. I want to make a comment just in general on revenue growth, because it's been very much a conversation we've been having with our many shareholders. I would encourage all of those collected today on the AGM to go to our website to listen to or read the transcript of our earnings release call January the 12th of this week. We have a lot of confidence in our strategic plan, which we announced in the fall to grow revenue. We'll do this by fundamentally transforming how we sell television, advancing our advertising technology roadmap and working with the industry coming together on common audience segments. We will put more content in more places as we pursue new and emerging platforms. STACKTV is a runaway hit and when combined with Nick+ on Amazon now has more than 400,000 paying subscribers in less than two years. Finally, we will pursue our studio ambitions, selling content internationally with our ever-expanding slate of great content at Corus Studios and Nelvana to fuel growth and to diversify our revenue. Thank you. We've not received any further questions pertaining to the business of Corus from the floor. Accordingly, it is appropriate to conclude the meeting now. Thank you all again for attending our virtual meeting today and for your ongoing interest in Corus. Back to you, operator. The 2020 annual meeting of shareholders of Corus Entertainment is now closed. Please disconnect your lines.
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