Crown Corporations Editing and Proofreading Services

A crown corporation lives with a contradiction it must explain in writing every year. It is expected to operate commercially, and it exists because the market would not deliver something the government wanted. When it makes money, someone asks why it is competing with private business; when it loses money, someone asks why taxpayers are subsidising it. The corporate plan and annual report are where that tension is either addressed honestly or papered over with language that satisfies nobody and invites the next round of the same questions.

We edit what crown corporations, state-owned enterprises and public bodies produce — corporate plans and summaries for tabling, annual reports and management discussion, statements of corporate intent and mandate letters, public policy objective and performance reporting, board governance documents and terms of reference, briefing material for responsible ministers and central agencies, submissions for borrowing and capital authority, special examination responses, procurement and commercial confidentiality documentation, access to information and proactive disclosure material, stakeholder and community reporting, and communications where commercial sensitivity and public accountability conflict. Our editors check that the commercial and public policy accounts of the same activity are consistent, since that is where scrutiny concentrates.

The corporate plan summary is the document that determines whether the corporation is understood, and most treat the public policy purpose as a preamble before getting to the business. That ordering is the problem. We rewrite these so the plan states first what the corporation exists to do that the market does not, then how it will be known whether that is happening, with measures that could actually fail — a plan whose targets are all achieved every year is describing its ambition rather than its performance. We make the commercial results and the public policy results appear together rather than in separate chapters, so a reader can see the trade-off being made: the route flown at a loss because the community depends on it, the product priced below cost because the mandate requires it. Stated plainly, those are the strongest arguments a crown corporation has, and burying them among commercial achievements is how they get mistaken for inefficiency.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including plans before tabling and commercially sensitive material. We are editors rather than governance, legal or financial advisers, and nothing here is advice on mandate, accountability or disclosure obligations. What we can do is make the documents clear and internally consistent for readers who include ministers, auditors, legislators and the public at once.