Corporate Knights Summer 2024

Carbon-price conundrum I am inclined to agree with Ralph Torrie’s analysis that consumer carbon pricing was oversold as the solution to the climate crisis. Some form of carbon pricing is essential to an effective climate-policy framework, but it cannot produce the necessary changes in behaviour within the required time frames on its own. Rather, a carbon-pricing system needs to be employed in conjunction with the full range of other available policy tools to achieve the required outcomes. A complete termination of the consumer pricing system at this point would run the risk of collapsing the federal government’s overall climate-policy framework. But a hold on the consumer price where it is, given that $80 per tonne is likely the absolute upper limit of its political acceptability, would make sense. The industrial…

“Ambition needs to be more than just words.” That was the message of hundreds of representatives from environmental groups and Indigenous communities who rallied on Parliament Hill in the lead-up to the fourth session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, or INC-4, in April. “Plastic pollution? We have solutions,” the group chanted as it marched through downtown Ottawa to the convention hall where negotiations were about to begin on a global treaty to end plastic pollution. Environmentalists were hopeful that the fourth of five rounds, which began two years ago in Uruguay, would make significant progress. But by the time negotiations ended late on the final night, that hope had dissolved. “We were not close to having an international instrument that works to eliminate plastic pollution after having…

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer. Since 1925, the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has sat squarely across from the White House, a formidable beaux arts edifice designed to reflect the power and unity of American business interests. From the outside, there is nothing to suggest what’s going on within: that the biggest business association in the world may be beginning, ever so slightly, to crumble. In recent years, some of the group’s largest members – including Microsoft, Ford, Meta, even Shell – have publicly challenged the trade organization’s advocacy around climate change. Ever since the chamber successfully lobbied to torpedo the biggest piece of climate legislation to reach Congress – the Build Back Better Act – in 2022, more and more members have indicated that if the…

Alex Robinson is the Ottawa-based deputy editor at Corporate Knights. Just 20 years ago, the Danish city of Odense was an industrial hub. Back then, Maersk, one of the world’s largest shipping companies, operated a shipyard on the city’s harbour front that manufactured some of the largest container ships in the world and employed almost 3,000 workers. The presence of heavy industry was felt throughout Odense for decades. Its first shipyard opened in 1918. A four-lane highway – named after Danish industrialist Thomas B. Thrige – carved through the city centre, splitting it in two. This all started to change after the global financial crisis of 2007/2008. The crisis, coupled with international competition, led to the Maersk shipyard closing in 2012. But where other industrial towns started falling into disrepair,…

Keldon Bester is the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and a former special advisor at the Competition Bureau. Standing at the corner of University Avenue and Dundas Street in downtown Toronto provides a familiar sight for Canadians: an RBC branch, a BMO branch and a CIBC branch. Beleaguered customers of either TD or Scotiabank will have to walk an extra block. In contrast with the top five banks in the United States, which hold just over a third of the market, Canada’s Big Five famously dominate around 90% of the market for financial services. They’re also some of the most profitable on the planet, with their Canadian personal and commercial banking services regularly notching profit margins north of 30%.…

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires–based journalist and associate editor at Corporate Knights. Annette Arjoon has spent decades saving sea turtles that come to nest on Guyana’s Shell Beach. The 120-kilometre-long ecosystem in the country’s northwest includes mangrove forests, swamps and savannahs, and, for part of the year, it’s a crucial pit stop on the migratory route of four endangered turtle species: green, leatherback, olive ridley and hawksbill. These sea turtles are an example of our interconnected natural world, with some travelling on to Brazil, Newfoundland and West Africa. Similarly, the conservation efforts on which their survival depends are woven together. “It’s a global effort,” says Arjoon, who founded the Guyana Marine Conservation Society. The same, of course, could be said of the battle that is underway to stop catastrophic…