Innholdsfortegnelse for Fall 2020 i Corporate Knights

The true cost of your favourite steak or chop may be much higher than the price you pay at the store. Thanks to the potential health risks of eating meat – higher incidences of obesity, heart disease, cancer and premature death – as well as the environmental devastation caused by mass-market meat production, society gets stuck with the tab every time you bite into a Whopper or a roast. Now a growing chorus of researchers is pushing for a combination of carbon taxes and “sin taxes” to mitigate meat’s impact – and the result may curb your appetite. “There’s increasing consensus that we cannot achieve the Paris Climate Agreement unless we deal with factory farming – a sector emitting more greenhouse gases than all the world’s planes, trains and cars…

A menagerie of genetically engineered mice, rats, macaque monkeys, rats, ferrets, hamsters, dogs and even horses have been enlisted in the race to find drugs and vaccines to thwart severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the infectious agent responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. Grim statistics lend urgency to this marathon, with the World Health Organization reporting more than one million global deaths and well over 30 million confirmed cases at deadline. Governments, trying to calm a frustrated and frightened populace, speak optimistically about pending new treatments as well as the ultimate goal, a vaccine. But some scientists and medical professionals are crying foul. The animals that are being used as laboratory test subjects in the search for COVID-19 therapeutics might be hindering, rather than helping, the race, they say.…

Conversations about the need for a more diverse and inclusive corporate Canada are not new. But recent anti-racism protests have placed the corporate realm under increased scrutiny. Companies face mounting pressure to address systemic racism by diversifying their boards, but does doing so ensure that representation filters down to the executive level, and ultimately create an inclusive corporate culture? A significant body of research has made clear the correlation between a diverse senior management team and improved company performance. McKinsey’s latest diversity study, released this spring, found that companies in the top quartile for ethnic diversity were 36% more profitable than those in the bottom quartile. A 2018 Deloitte report found that inclusive companies also outperform on customer satisfaction (+39%), productivity (+22%) and turnover (-22%). Regardless of the evidence, however,…

Economic policy-making has, over the past hundred years or more, stripped out caring from our understanding of what makes the economy tick. Caring – for children, for elders, for the planet – sounds to many like a distraction from the main attraction, especially during the pandemic, when what we need are jobs and robust economic growth. But as the COVID-19 pandemic brought the global economy to a grinding halt, locking down working parents and idling activity in many sectors, it became clear that if we don’t put caring back into the economy, we can’t achieve economic recovery. The pandemic has revealed economic fault lines that must be addressed. We can’t “get back to normal”; we need to create a better normal. And we certainly won’t be able to build back…

Phil De Luna Program director, National Research Council As a scientist with two advanced degrees – and the youngest program director of the National Research Council (NRC), at age 27 – Phil De Luna could come to the climate change table as a technocratic know-it-all. Instead, he brings empathy for Alberta’s oil and gas industry and other sectors disrupted by what he sees as “the biggest problem we have as a species.” “What I am really passionate about is ensuring this transition [to a low-carbon economy] is a just one and there is economic opportunity for everyone in this energy transition,” says De Luna, whose people-oriented outlook is rooted in experience. Growing up in Windsor, Ontario, in a family of Filipino immigrants to Canada, he witnessed the devastating 2008/2009 recession…

Determining just what makes a company socially responsible involves an ever-growing list of factors, from producing safe, reliable products and minimizing pollution to community development and protecting consumer privacy. But according to Just Capital, a New York–based association that measures and promotes positive business practices, there’s one indicator that the public considers most important: how companies invest in their workforce. In simplest terms: do firms pay their employees a fair wage – or the lowest amount they can get away with? Just Capital compared the financial performance of companies that pay relatively high wages to all their workers against industry peers that don’t offer premiums. Grinding through those companies’ financials through the economic downturn, job title by job title, Just Capital’s researchers found that the top 20% of firms enjoyed…

Workers and fashion-loving consumers alike are fighting back against the world’s top fashion brands, which left independent suppliers in the lurch for up to US$40 billion in unpaid bills. When COVID struck and the malls shut down, more than 2,000 retail and fashion companies abruptly cancelled thousands of orders, many failing to pay even for those that had been completed. The small suppliers who produce some of the world’s best-known brands – The Gap, Nike, Primark, H&M and hundreds more – were forced to cut staff or even close their doors, leaving millions of workers struggling to feed their families. At the best of times, garment workers, most of them based in Asia and primarily female, live precarious lives. They work up to 60 hours a week earning as little…

In more normal times, the news that a major oil and gas company was cutting its dividend in half and planning to reduce its production by 40% would be met with an onslaught of selling. But these are not normal times, and that’s especially true for large oil and gas companies like BP. Case in point: on August 4, the date that BP announced it was fundamentally altering its business strategy to adapt to the challenges posed by climate change, its shares rose by about 7% – on a day when the broader index of energy producers saw much more modest gains. “If that doesn’t tell you a story about how the math has changed, nothing will,” says Andrew Grant, the head of Oil, Gas and Mining at Carbon Tracker,…

As the automotive industry attempts to recover from the COVID-19 lockdown, we’ve found bad news and worse news for prospective electric car owners. For a start, there still isn’t sufficient supply of EVs getting into Canada to meet consumer demand. According to a report prepared for Transport Canada by Montreal-based Dunsky Energy Consulting, just one in three Canadian car dealers had an electric vehicle in stock in the first half of February 2020 (before the pandemic prompted showrooms to close for two months). That figure fell to less than 20% outside of Quebec, B.C. and Ontario, with an average of two- to three-month wait times. “That means many Canadians struggle to find an EV to test drive, let alone buy,” Clean Energy Canada said in a statement. For those who…

In 2017, the International Monetary Fund estimated that Canada’s labour force could grow by more than half a million – boosting GDP by 4% in the medium-term – if women matched men in workforce participation, and much of that participation gap could be reduced through better childcare options. A national childcare program built on lessons from Quebec would require additional federal investment of $80 billion over the next 10 years, representing 0.35% of GDP annually (assuming matching funds provided by provinces and territories). Combined, this would get Canada to childcare investments of 0.7% of GDP, which is on par with the OECD median but below top countries like Sweden or France. The cost would be offset by economic growth (2.4% higher in the medium-term) created by reducing the gender gap…

Canada’s globe-trotting financial guru has come home – with a mission that couldn’t be more global. Mark Carney is the plain-speaking former governor of the Bank of Canada who guided the country unflappably through the 2008 financial crisis before he was lured away in 2013 to run the Bank of England until early this year. There he confronted two even tougher tests, steering the U.K. economy through Brexit while urging the global financial community to face up to the climate crisis. His term up (after a few extensions), but far from retirement at 55, Carney is still looking to make an impact. Even before he returned home to Ottawa earlier this year, the United Nations named him Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, focusing on mobilizing private finance to…

The rise of COVID has shone a spotlight on an often-overlooked employment benefit. Paid sick leave helps employees get through hard times, whether they’re actually sick or just need to self-isolate. Employees without paid sick leave face a desperate choice: stay home and forfeit your kids’ grocery budget, or go to work and infect your colleagues and friends. In the pandemic, sick leave emerged early as a fault line. In Canada and the United States, paid sick leave is essentially an executive perk: there is no national right to paid sick leave, although some U.S. states have established their own paid-leave policies. In May, the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre called on the federal government to require 10 days of statutory paid sick leave for businesses across Canada. Later that month,…

Australia’s Griffith Business School leads this year’s Corporate Knights list of the top 40 global business schools that embrace planet-friendly values – doing so without using “sustainability” or “responsible corporate practice” in the name of its Master of Business Administration program. Of course, when pitching to prospective students, the east-coast Australia school highlights sustainability and responsibility as two core values (the third is its Asia-focused location) in curriculum and research; it just sees no need to attach an adjective to the MBA. “We have made a conscious decision that we believe every MBA should be a sustainable MBA,” says Stephanie Schleimer, Griffith’s MBA director, thrilled that her school is number one for the first time on the Corporate Knights Better World MBA ranking. “We don’t call our courses fancy names,…

The COVID-19 lockdown, while in many ways stultifying, stressful and depressing, also had some unexpected upsides. As human activity waned, nature came to the fore. City dwellers were suddenly aware of birdsong. On the epic dog walks that became the highlight of our days, random strangers would comment on how blue the sky was, how clear the air, how resplendent the ravine in spring. Climate activists noted, with some combination of cynicism and optimism, how quickly the world managed to mobilize in the face of an immediate threat. And indeed, the radical change in human behaviour – the grounded planes, eliminated commutes, reduction in industrial production and power generation – had an impact. By early April, daily global CO2 emissions had dropped by 17% compared with mean levels in 2019.…