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Every spring, Canadian issuers on a December year-end move through the same narrow window. Regulatory requirements and shareholder notice periods put the drafting window for the Management Information Circular squarely in Q1 and early Q2. It’s a short window for a document that has become longer, more visual, and more consequential every year.
Once filed, the circular is reviewed, compared, and assessed by an increasingly attentive audience. That audience includes advisors, institutional investors, governance watchdogs like the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance, and public rankings like The Globe and Mail’s Board Games, which uses the MIC as its primary source. Of note, the 2026 Board Games methodology, published in February, is largely unchanged from 2025, with a small refinement to how boards’ oversight of cybersecurity and AI risk is scored.
With the combination of a compressed window and rising expectations, something predictable happens.
- Content ends up scattered across multiple documents.
- Reconciliation details live in the audited financials.
- Policies sit on the corporate website.
- Key tables appear in another filing.
From a compliance standpoint, the disclosure exists. From a scoring standpoint, only what’s inside the circular counts. It’s precisely how thoughtful, well-governed issuers quietly lose marks year over year.
That’s a document assembly problem as much as it is a disclosure problem. Solving it means rethinking how disclosure documents are built.
Introducing Quinn, our next generation, SaaS platform for the creation, collaboration, publishing, filing and distribution of complex regulatory disclosure documents.
Meet Quinn for MIC
Quinn by Toppan Merrill is the next-generation SaaS platform for creating, collaborating, publishing, filing, and distributing Management Information Circulars. It was built to remove the low-value formatting of the document that slows teams down, so content creators can focus on the words, the numbers, and the story.
If you haven’t seen Quinn in action, the Quinn for MIC overview video is a good place to start.
Why we separate style from content
After years in design and document production, one challenge remains constant. Making content and design feel like they belong together.
Anyone who has worked on a Management Information Circular knows the drill. A change to a table, paragraph or any data point creates unintended formatting issues which adds manual work, slows collaboration and introduces formatting inconsistencies.
Quinn eliminates that friction.
Quinn automates the application of company brand and style with the click of a button and can be predefined based on a customers output requirement. This frees authors & collaborators to focus entirely on the content without continually fighting with formatting. Quinn governs how content is presented, ensuring your document remains consistent according to your standards.
The result of separating content from style:
- Authors focus on content, not formatting
- Teams collaborate without disrupting document design
- Changes can be made quickly without creating additional formatting work
- Branding & presentation remain consistent throughout the document
- The MIC is produced faster with no manual cleanup and is always in print-ready format
What that unlocks for the people around the table
- Legal counsel stops chasing formatting cleanup and focuses on the disclosure itself
- Corporate secretaries work from a single source of truth instead of reconciling versions across email chains
- Designers build the visual system once, creating a framework that supports evolving content
- Investor relations gets a document ready for the board without a full proof cycle
The Five Smarts, at a glance
Quinn features five core functionalities that allow draft teams to move faster and with full confidence. Each of these has a short video that shows each. If you only have a few minutes right now, start with Smart Format.
Smart Format: Perfectly published documents, with the click of a button
Smart Share: Invite collaboration while retaining document control
Smart Track: Every edit, every user, to the second
Smart Content: Change once, change everywhere
Smart Sync: Leverage Excel® financial data in real time
Meet Quinn.
If you’d like a closer look at how Quinn for MIC could support your team this season, our Canadian team would be glad to introduce you to the platform and answer whatever’s on your mind. There’s no demo script. Just a conversation.
