I think that s. 30 of the BC Business Corporations Act could and should simply be eliminated and replaced by an inclusive list of rights, powers and privileges. Simply put, corporations are not people. I do not believe that they should be considered people. I personally don’t believe that there is any benefit to invoking them with “personhood” or perpetuating the legal fiction that they are persons. Instead, I find it detrimental, and feel believe that it helps corporations get away with wrongdoings. Corporations cannot go to jail and are not thinking, feeling beings. They do not decide to take actions on their own, instead they depend on many minds to create a “controlling mind” and do not have access to the same rights, powers, and privileges as humans.
As we have seen from case law, especially regarding section 7 of the Charter, humans and corporations have different rights and I believe that it would be more beneficial to simply state what rights, powers, and privileges they are entitled to. I think that it would be advisable because it would eliminate the courts need to interpret what rights should/are meant to apply to companies and which rights are reserved only for “individuals” or “natural persons”. It would also do away with costly and time consuming court cases that deal with this issue and allow the courts to deal with more serious matters.
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I couldn’t have found better words for my own opinions.! The personification of corporations has always seemed to me to be a way to scapegoat liability. The reoccurring analogy to car share programs only served to further solidify this point of view for me. There just seems to be be something fundamentally unjust to afford “the rights, powers and privileges of an individual of full capacity” to an artificial entity when there are so many non-artificial entities (people) who have acted honestly but get the short end of the stick because they don’t have the resources at their disposal to craft an argument enabling them to be veiled from the consequences of their actions.
What I have taken from our overview of corporate law is that the courts spend an awful lot of time in court sorting out issues which could be resolved in a thoughtfully drafted statute. It’s clear that this dominant system will remain in place so why not sharpen the tools in our toolbox, and the language contained in the statute, to make things not only more predictable and reliable but more understandable to the everyday person.
Since we’ve spent so much of the course talking about corporate personhood, it’s almost startling to see someone bluntly declare that they think section 30 of the BCBCA should be scrapped. But it’s a fascinating thing to think about! Realistically, it’s never going to happen given how indispensable corporate personhood has become to business in Canada and across the globe, but it’s interesting to reflect on why we maybe ought to want it eliminated anyway. Your post is intriguing because it highlights the moral considerations underlying this area of the law – if we embrace corporations as persons, what does that say about how we conceptualize and value the very idea of personhood? There is an argument to be made—and one I think you’re both alluding to—that corporate personhood is damaging because it diminishes the natural, flesh-and-blood person. In other words, acknowledging corporations as legal people devalues our humanity and the significance of what it means to be a person because we’re trying to treat two inherently different things as being more or less equal. Philosophically, it’s an interesting thing to ponder.
Thanks for your thoughts Rose. I agree that I find corporate personhood troubling. I wonder if it is related to the tendency to personify the corporation as a natural person in our society, a person with a moral compass, social responsibility etc. Yet the purpose of a corporation is not to find happiness nor fulfilment, nor a suitable place in society. There goals are often more streamlined.