Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2021 i Corporate Knights

Max Fawcett is a freelance writer and the former editor of Alberta Oil magazine. For many Albertans, the news that U.S. President-elect Joe Biden planned to cancel Keystone XL’s presidential permit on his first day in office came as a major disappointment. But while their government was more interested in picking a fight with the most powerful country in the world, some were looking for the silver linings on an otherwise dark cloud. It wasn’t that hard to find them, either, because while Biden’s win meant the end of Keystone XL’s decade-long saga, it also marks the beginning of a new chapter for the province’s cleantech sector – one that might soon create more jobs than Keystone ever could. “A crisis is a horrible thing to waste,” says Paul Pede,…

As businesses look to operate more sustainably, there has been a growing movement to draw on the wealth of Indigenous knowledge that’s intimately connected with the natural world. In Canada’s rapidly evolving environmental sector, Indigenous Peoples can benefit from the increase in environmentally oriented jobs. That’s the objective of ECO Canada’s BEAHR training program, which builds capacity among Indigenous youth and membership to engage in meaningful environmental careers. BEAHR provides customizable environmental training programs for Indigenous communities that braid Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with Western science. Progress in the growing environmental sector is not possible without collaboration with Indigenous communities; their vast knowledge is crucial in informing business practices and decision-making throughout Canada. This is especially important for companies that operate in the natural resources sectors, where nearby Indigenous communities…

Tabatha Bull is president & CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. In recent years, we have seen a resurgence in the Indigenous economy. There are close to 60,000 Indigenous businesses in Canada, operating in every sector, size and region, with Indigenous people creating businesses at nine times the rate of non-Indigenous Canadians. Then, of course, COVID happened. My first day as CEO of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business (CCAB) was March 16, 2020 – the same day our office began working remotely to help stop the spread of a new virus that had begun to sweep across the globe. Since then, I have seen businesses and communities pull together in formidable ways, but there’s no denying that the pandemic has been particularly hard on Indigenous businesses. In…

Jenn Harper had spent 15 years working in wholesale food service and the hospitality sector and never dreamed of owning an internationally acclaimed beauty brand – until one night she did exactly that. “It was 2015, and I had this crazy dream about lip gloss and little native girls. I woke up in the middle of the night and started writing out all these ideas that came flooding from the dream.” Her first thought was to create liquid lipstick to fund a scholarship in her grandmother’s name. Harper’s Anishinaabe grandmother was a residential school survivor and suffered great trauma as a result of the experience. Harper had a long-held desire to do something meaningful, something that would make an impact in her Indigenous community. But it wasn’t enough to create…

More than 3,100 companies trade on the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations exchange – Nasdaq. They run the gamut from tech giants like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft to little-known pharmaceutical and clean energy start-ups. So any move by Nasdaq to enhance the governance of its listings has the potential to ripple through a wide swath of corporate America and beyond. The exchange took a step in that direction in December with a proposal that at least two members of most listed companies’ boards cannot be straight white men. Small boards with five or fewer members will be allowed to have just one “diverse” director. The move has drawn praise from the American Civil Liberties Union – hardly known as a friend of big business. “By pushing its listed…

While Canadians hunkered down in their homes last year, plant protein sales surged 30% in this country, and food chains and manufacturers are scrambling to keep up with demand. Maple Leaf Foods just announced a new 118,000-square-foot tempeh facility in Indianapolis. Burger King is debuting its plant-based Impossible Whopper this spring, and Beyond Meat just locked McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell into partnership deals to feed the global plant-based craze. And while being smack dab in the middle of Canada’s largest beef-producing region may have earned Calgary the nickname Cowtown, the city is quickly emerging as a major player in the booming plant protein business. Last month, the U.K.’s Meatless Farm set up shop in the Albertan city with a US$12-million, 30,000-square-foot plant with the capacity to produce up…

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer. As a girl growing up in Victoria, B.C., Tamara Vrooman did not set her sights on landing one of the most senior jobs in Canadian banking. Pursuing her own interests, she played string bass in high school and studied history at the University of Victoria. It was only while defending her master’s thesis on the B.C.government’s policy of forced sterilization of the “feeble-minded” in the early 20th century that she realized her fascination with the government’s role in shaping the lives of Canadians. She also realized that, rather than study the intersection of private and public interests, she would prefer “to go to where the decisions are made,” as she told The Globe and Mail in a 2009 interview. That’s where she now is,…

* Emissions per capita = tonnes CO2e per person from industrial, commercial, institutional and household sources The five largest provinces together accounted for more than 90% of Canada’s GHG emissions in 2018. However, the rest of the provinces and territories also have a role to play in increasing Canada’s ambition. The federal government is committing Canada to achieving a net-zero emissions goal by 2050, but getting there will require substantially more action from provincial governments to reduce greenhouse gases. Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson released Ottawa’s bulked-up plan in December, highlighted by a proposal to increase the federal price on carbon to $170 a tonne by 2030 from $50 a tonne in 2022. After the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the constitutionality of the federal carbon price in a March decision,…

Lloyd Alter is design editor for Treehugger.com and author of the upcoming book Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle. Once the world’s richest man, leading the world’s biggest tech company, Bill Gates spends most of his time and money at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dealing with health, gender equality and education. Now he has turned his roving eye to the climate crisis with his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. Gates is a philanthropist now, but he still has a head for numbers. However, numbers are the biggest problem with this book, starting with the first sentence: “There are two numbers you need to know about climate change. The first is 51 billion. The other is zero.” Fifty-one billion was the number of tonnes of CO2 from…

Oil and gas guzzlers: Fossil fuel companies with less than 20% of their near-term investment in the energy transition. Climate-policy blockers: Companies lobbying against climate policy. Coal mongers: Companies that engage in production of coal or coal-based energy (>20% of power production and >10% revenue). Nature wreckers: Companies that have caused severe environmental damage, identified by the Norwegian sovereign fund (NBIM). Forest razers: Worst-in-class companies engaging in deforestation in South America and Southeast Asia or that cause the most harm in the palm oil industry. Dirty cement-makers: Environmental laggards in the cement industry. Source: Holdings info from S&P Capital IQ. Internal analysis from Corporate Knights. Illustration by Graham Roumieu…

In 2017, the Trudeau Liberals pledged to end the sale of all new petroleum-powered vehicles within 23 years. It was a bold step at the time, when electric vehicles (EVs) accounted for just 1% of auto industry sales. But thanks to new technologies, Canadians seem likely to put their old gas-guzzlers in the rearview mirror long before 2040. In February, a KPMG study reported that 68% of Canadians who plan to buy a new vehicle in the next five years say they are likely to buy an EV. Younger drivers are more charged up than their parents: 79% of drivers aged 18 to 44 say they’re likely to buy an EV in the next five years, versus just 58% of adults over 45. “Canada’s automotive industry is nearing the tipping…

It seemed like the culmination of the American dream when California-based Taylor Guitars announced it was embracing 100% employee ownership. But the big winners may eventually be Canadians. Hippie musicians Kurt Listug and Bob Taylor were young coworkers at a small guitar shop called the American Dream when the owner quit to go backpacking (it was 1974, after all). The pair bought the store for $3,700, including machinery and parts, and renamed it. Nearly 50 years later, Taylor Guitars has 1,200 employees and factories in El Cajon, California, and Tecate, Mexico. Listug and Taylor aren’t quite ready for retirement, but they’re serious about ensuring that their departure won’t hurt the company’s fortunes, its products or its employees. Taylor Guitars is too big for individual employees to buy, which usually means…

Toby Sparwasser Soroka is a German-Canadian whose professional interests span across social entrepreneurship and disruptive technology. Last summer, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced he would be issuing “giant contracts” to mining companies capable of supplying Tesla with nickel in an “environmentally sensitive” way. “Please mine more nickel,” he asked bluntly. By October, Tesla was in talks with Vale, the world’s largest producer of the mineral, about securing sustainable nickel from its Canadian mines to power Tesla’s electric vehicle batteries. No firm definition of “environmentally sensitive” was given, but as minerals become increasingly critical to a low-carbon future, attention around how those minerals are extracted and produced is growing sharply. Cleantech’s cleanest resources are not in short supply: wind is free and the sun shines, at no charge. Yet enormous amounts…

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer who focuses on climate change and the low-carbon energy economy. Terri Lynn Morrison is director of strategic partnerships and communications at Indigenous Clean Energy and a Mi’gmaq from Listuguj, Quebec. mounting an Indigenous-led clean energy project in Canada’s remote communities takes a special kind of resilience, as best intentions meet the harsh reality of permitting delays, construction deadlines and difficult negotiations with governments and local utilities. At a recent Gathering of Indigenous Clean Energy (ICE), Nihtat Energy Ltd. president Grant Sullivan gave a master class on the challenges and rewards of installing solar panels in offgrid Nihtat Gwich’in communities in the Northwest Territories. In two separate projects, Nihtat Energy – a Nihtat Gwich’in development corporation – installed solar panels to provide electricity to the…

Back in the day, only the most committed hunted down ethical investments. You had to run your finger through a phone book in search of a credit union, then head across town to meet with a financial planner who knew something – anything – about responsible investing. Fast forward to the present and sustainable investment funds are going gangbusters, hitting a global record of US$1.65 trillion by the end of 2020. Around the world, investment firms, corporations and governments are scrambling to respond to calls for increased climate action and societal justice with pledges to measure everything against an environmental, social and governance (ESG) yardstick. But in the ESG stampede, insiders warn that too many stocks are getting tossed into green funds without enough oversight. There have been grumblings about…

Jennifer Lewington is an intrepid reporter and writes regularly on many topics, including business school news.. When the University of Victoria ended fossil fuel investments in its $225-million working capital fund in February, student activists cheered a hard-won victory. “It has taken eight years of student action to get to this point,” says Emily Lowan, lead organizer of Divest UVic. “I wish the speed of action was quicker, but still it is a major victory that should be celebrated.” The campaign is not over. Activists are now focused on UVic’s $445-million endowment foundation. Over the past four years, the endowment has cut fossil fuel investments to below 2% of its portfolio, but it has not as yet promised full divestment. “We are still only halfway there,” Lowan says. The developments…