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In the first half of 2026, Canada’s shareholder activism market was driven less by campaign volume and more by precision, with insider-led campaigns and board success at smaller targets emerging as some of the defining features of the landscape.
Overall, activists lined up 28 targets during the first six months of the year, a 30% drop when compared to the same period in 2025 with activity accounting for just 4% of the global total.
However, despite the relative fall in public campaigns, the number of seats won held flat at 13.
“We’re not seeing activism driven by sheer volume this proxy season,” explained Victor Li, executive vice president at Kingsdale Advisors, who sees activism in Canada as becoming “much more targeted, more sophisticated, and, frankly, more strategic than it used to be.”
“If I had to sum it up in one word: it would be precision,” added Li, who heads Kingsdale’s governance advisory division.
'I want my old job back'
Of the 12 Canada-based companies where activists had sought board seats in the opening half of the year, three were targeted by former company affiliates, Diligent Market Intelligence (DMI) data show.
“We call this ‘I want my old job back activism,’ it’s quite common in Canada,” said Jon Feldman, partner at Goodmans.
In Canada, proxy fights driven by ousted leaders sometimes pay off because of the preponderance of medium-sized and smaller companies, where even after a jarring exit, a former CEO or founder can retain significant sway among shareholders.
According to Li, when a CEO leaves under contentious circumstances, they are often uniquely positioned to build an activist case because "the distance between insider knowledge and a credible campaign is relatively short."
After an acrimonious and months-long campaign, yoga pants brand Lululemon Athletica gave board seats to two of three nominees put forward by Dennis ‘Chip’ Wilson, the company’s founder and an evergreen critic since exiting the CEO job in 2005.
Agreed in May, that settlement was followed by the company opting to declassify its board in another win for the insider-turned-dissident.
In another insider-led effort, Talal Debs launched a push for change at Zefiro Methane following his mid-2025 departure from the CEO role. And while Debs’ X Machina Capital Strategies failed to sweep the board in a March vote that saw him lose his seat, the dissident has vowed to maintain pressure on the company he founded.
“Usually, these founders or CEOs already have a significant stake that either they own themselves or that they own along with friends, so it can be easy for them to launch a campaign and come in with a baseline of support,” Feldman pointed out.
Former CEOs also often played “a key role in fundraising,” particularly at small cap companies, Atkinson argued, and at the same time likely have allies among investors.
Smaller targets
Outside of non-traditional campaigns, Canada's more targeted approach has also driven activists toward the smaller end of the market which accounted for 46% of overall activity in the country in H1.
Activists also made most of their seat gains in the period at smaller* targets. Of the eight Canada-based companies where dissidents took seats in the first half of 2026, six were from the lower end of the market capitalization universe.
“Canada is a country with a high proportion of small cap issuers, so we tend to have a disproportionate number of these fights,” said Atkinson.
Large-cap targets accounted for 39% of overall activity in the market in the opening half. “The bar is simply higher for large caps,” added Li, who warned would-be activists that they need to come up with “a very clear thesis and credible path to influence” before they commence engagement as they attempt to ascend the market-cap rankings.
The sole large cap where an activist saw board seat success in Canada during H1 was Lululemon, where it took a co-founder to effect change. Meanwhile, midcap Lionsgate Studios made room for U.S. President Donald Trump’s first-term Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as part of a January settlement with Liberty 77 Capital and MHR Fund Management, having also recently been targeted by Anson Funds.
Companies across the lower valuation ranges often offer “the most variance in terms of performance relative to peers where there's more weaknesses when it comes to governance issues,” according to Feldman.
The pull to settle
The Lionsgate pact marked another continuation from last year’s H1 when all board seats gained by activists came via cooperation agreements.
In H1 2026, 12 of the 13 director seats were acquired via such accords with companies, DMI data show.
“The general tendency is for more to get settled because of the cost and the time associated with running a campaign,” said Feldman. “People on both sides want a quick resolution because it just makes everybody's lives easier.”
But while settlements have dominated the first half of this year, out of season special meeting votes could surface in H2 with those involving insiders expected to be among the most contentious. “If there are more fights launched by deposed CEOs, you could see more votes,” according to Feldman.
Such contests “tend to be pretty binary and do not offer an easy route to settlement,” Atkinson pointed out.
*Includes nano-cap (<$50M), micro-cap ($50m-$250M) and small-cap ($250M-$2B)
