In December, the Alberta Securities Commission (ASC) published its annual Corporate Finance Disclosure Report (Report). The ASC then hosted an information seminar (Seminar) on the Report’s findings and recommendations in Calgary, Alberta on January 11, 2017. Fasken Martineau was pleased to attend the Seminar with a view to advising our reporting issuer clients as to best disclosure practices.
The ASC chose to focus on commodity price impacts on continuous disclosure by reporting issuers, as opposed to the more typical practice of a broader-scope report. As such, the Report gave topical and important reviews, in that context, on the use of non-GAAP measures (NGMs) and forward-looking information, as well as impairment of assets under accounting standards. Most prominent among the continuous disclosure issues in the Report, however, was liquidity and capital resources information in management discussion and analysis disclosure.
We expect the ASC will be paying particular attention to fulsome and timely disclosure of liquidity and capital resources information in 2017, particularly in respect of plans to remedy working capital deficiencies, conditional borrowing limits, risk of breach of financial covenants, and impacts on production capacity maintenance following capital expenditure reductions and asset dispositions.
