Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2024 i Corporate Knights

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…

John Lorinc is a journalist and author specializing in urban issues, business and culture. Montreal’s transit corporation delivers precisely the kind of meat-and-potatoes service that most legacy transit agencies offer: it manages a 68-station subway network, the construction of which dates back to Quebec’s 1960s nation-building era and operates some 2,000 buses that haul Montrealers over more than 200 routes. Like busy transit operations everywhere, Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is axiomatically good for the climate and the local economy. With average daily ridership of about 1.7 million, STM officials like to say – correctly – that its very existence promotes intensification and allows riders to spend far less of their incomes on getting around than they would by operating a car. Yet in the transit-friendly annals of Montreal…

Shilpa Tiwari is the co-founder of Isenzo, a boutique firm that takes a systems approach to ESG, and the founder of No Women No Spice. She lives in Tanzania and Toronto. In the bustling marketplaces of East Africa, where vibrant hues of second-hand clothing are piled in heaps, lies a hidden account of globalization, economic survival and cultural transformation. Trade in mitumba – “bundles” in Swahili – is not merely a commercial enterprise but a phenomenon at the intersection of global consumer habits and local realities. As millions of garments flow to African shores each month, they bring with them contradiction and opportunity. The legacy of “waste colonialism” in the fashion sector is undeniable. Marketed as economic aid, the export of second-hand clothing also allows Western nations to shed their…

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%.…

On a sunny and already sweltering afternoon in early May, 14 representatives from various public and non-profit organizations gathered in a suburban Phoenix cooling centre to launch a concerted effort to forestall a repeat of the calamity of the summer of 2023. Last summer, more than 900 Arizonans died, and thousands more were hospitalized, during a record-breaking heat wave during which temperatures topped 43°C for weeks on end. The participants included municipal, county, state and federal officials, leaders of local faith groups, meteorologists and even someone from an Arizona tourism promotion department. But the first speaker, a veteran public health epidemiologist named Eugene Livar, bore a novel title that seemed intended to signal a seriousness of purpose in the fight to come. Earlier in the year, Governor Katie Hobbs had…

If there was one moment that was emblematic of Tom Mulcair’s tenure as Quebec environment minister, it was the confiscation of the pigs. And there were a lot of pigs. On a frosty January day in 2006, a dozen inspectors from Quebec’s environment ministry, accompanied by a dozen members of the Sûreté du Québec, rolled into the farm of Clément Roy, in the Beauce countryside south of Quebec City. Together, they loaded all of Roy’s livestock – 585 sows, hogs and piglets, plus 12 cows – onto a fleet of transport trucks and drove them to the regional auction house to be sold. Vast quantities of the pig slurry and manure stored in Roy’s barns were sucked onto 50 tank trucks and removed. The bill for this unprecedented “nettoy-age,” plus…

Mitchell Beer is founding publisher and managing editor of The Energy Mix. Canada faces an investment gap of more than $600 billion to complete the shift to a zero-carbon road transportation system by 2050, but the effort will more than pay for itself, a recent Corporate Knights analysis shows. This transition will take up to $666 billion in capital investments, but Canada won’t reach even 10% of that total if things stay at their current pace, said Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps and research director Ralph Torrie during a presentation at the EV & Charging Expo 2024 in Toronto. Various levels of government and vehicle fleet owners will need to up their games, Torrie said. “Up until now, it is private households that have been shouldering the capital costs of…

Rick Spence is a business journalist and editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. In early May, the federal government announced that Canada had “bent the curve” on climate pollution. New figures showed that carbon emissions in 2022 fell to “significantly lower” than pre-pandemic levels in 2019, giving hope that Canada can meet its net-zero commitments. “The hard work of Canadians is paying off,” Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said. That hard work is often hard to see, the product of millions of Canadians and thousands of businesses quietly, persistently adopting new approaches to life and work, eschewing waste, prioritizing collaboration and generally learning to do more with less. Since 2002, Corporate Knights has recognized this work by publishing the Best 50 list of Canada’s top corporate citizens – the businesses that prize sustainability…

Richa Narvekar is an independent academic and architectural designer based out of Toronto and Goa, India. By the middle of April, Mumbai had recorded its highest temperature of the last 15 years, approaching 40°C. Officials from the India Meteorological Department attributed the length of the unrelenting heat wave, ironically, to what is commonly seen as a marker of urban “development”: a boom in (heat-trapping) high-rises. Today, India has 461 million people living in urban centres. A proportionately staggering pace and scale of construction is underway, leaving the country vulnerable to major climatic impacts. A ballooning carbon footprint compounds matters, as globally the buildings and construction sector is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for 37% of global emissions, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Applying the ubiquitous…