The Laura Maersk says a lot about her country of origin. Denmark, the Nordic nation of some six million people, is a leader in clean technology, emission reductions and the energy transition. It is home to an extraordinary number of sector-leading companies whose sustainability performance soars above global standards. And as much of Europe and the world walk back or water down their climate ambitions, Denmark just keeps steaming ahead, a shining example of how sustainability and economic competitiveness can go hand in hand.

The most recent edition of the Climate Change Performance Index, which assesses countries’ efforts to meet Paris Agreement goals, gives Denmark the top ranking of all jurisdictions it surveys: 63 countries plus the European Union. The index looks at greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, renewable energy and climate policy. Denmark’s climate minister, Lars Aagaard, hammered this home when he announced, at COP30 in Brazil last November, that his country was setting itself one of the most ambitious emissions targets in the world: an 82% reduction from 1990 levels by 2035, blowing past the EU’s broad goal of something between 66.3% and 72.5% by that same year. Canada, by comparison, has pledged to reduce emissions by 45% and 50% of 2005 levels by 2035. These aren’t just grand aspirations from Denmark: it is currently on track to meet its 2030 emissions goal and seems within reach of climate neutrality by 2045, five years before the EU.

So how does Denmark do it? What combination of factors has enabled the country to reduce emissions, excel in clean technology, cultivate broad public support for ambitious climate and sustainability policy while, at the same time, maintaining the fourth-highest gross domestic product per capita in Europe? “There’s a saying in Danish: ‘If two Danes meet, they shake hands. If three Danes meet, they form an association,’” says Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, a professor of political science at Aarhus University and an expert in social capital and climate policy. Svendsen believes that Denmark’s ability to problem-solve quickly and to rally around the collective good is rooted in something quite intangible.

Social trust – faith in the words and deeds of other people – runs exceptionally high in Denmark: when surveyed, 75% of Danes claim to trust others, well above the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average. Svendsen traces the attribute back to the seafaring Vikings of the early medieval period, who plied the world’s oceans in search of trading opportunities. Largely illiterate, they cemented deals with handshakes: an informal way of doing things that rewarded honesty and “created a norm for good behaviour,” as Svendsen puts it. He sees that same pragmatism and bedrock of social trust as the basis of Denmark’s energy transition, citing as an example the astonishing transformation of the island of Samsø. Facing a rising tide of out-migration and unemployment, the 4,000 residents of this small island off the Jutland peninsula decided, in 1997, to go all in on renewable energy. Through the installation of 11 onshore and 10 offshore wind turbines, four biomass-fuelled district-heating plants and solar panels, a wholescale reduction in energy consumption, and conversion to electric vehicles, the island was able to run entirely off renewables by 2007: a first in the world.

Key to the success of this project, and Denmark’s energy transition more broadly, has been the prioritization of local ownership and direct economic participation. On Samsø, the rule was if you could see a windmill from your home, you had the right to invest in it. Turbines, once viewed as visual blights, were suddenly retirement plans. This shift in mindset has been key to the Danish energy transition. In 1996, when Copenhagen’s municipal energy utility launched what was, at the time, the world’s largest offshore wind farm project, it invited locals to participate. The 8,650 members of the Middelgrunden Wind Turbine Cooperative raised half the project’s construction costs and continue to own half the project. It’s a prime example of the Danish public–private partnership, aligning government policy with private capital and community ownership. Wind energy in Denmark, which now accounts for 60% of the country’s electricity – the highest per capita generation in the world – has been built on the model; since 2009, Danish law has mandated that 20% of all new projects be community-owned.

There’s a saying in Danish: ‘If two Danes meet, they shake hands. If three Danes meet, they form an association.

— Gert Tinggaard Svendsen, a professor of political science at Aarhus University

Local ownership means that the benefits of renewables are directly felt, and this has engendered a sense of civic pride in Danes, who view the energy transition less as a mandated concession to planetary limits than an exciting opportunity. Copenhagen’s new power plant, which converts municipal waste to both heat and electricity, takes pride of place on the city’s waterfront. Designed by the Danish architectural Bjarke Ingels Group, the eye-catching building, which opened in 2017, features a ski hill on its sloping roof and a climbing wall on its aluminum facade: a model of what Ingels calls “hedonistic sustainability.”

Sustainability has become Denmark’s brand. Since 2019, its foreign ministry has explicitly put green diplomacy at the centre of its foreign, trade and development policy. As current holder of the Council of the European Union presidency, Denmark has been framing the energy transition – and dissociation from Russian oil – as a security imperative. It also continues to nudge international organizations toward greater climate ambition.

Which brings us back to the Laura Maersk, the methanol-fuelled container ship. As the sixth-largest shipping nation in the world, Denmark has been pushing the International Maritime Organization to adopt regulations that will make global shipping, which currently accounts for some 2% to 3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, net-zero by 2050. Laura’s launch reflected Denmark’s determination to meet this goal. It also highlights a feature of Danish corporate culture that has made the country’s private sector more committed to sustainability than most.

Like several of Denmark’s most successful companies, Maersk is owned by a foundation. According to Steen Thomsen, professor of corporate governance at the Copenhagen Business School, 1,400 such enterprise foundations are registered in Denmark, among them roughly 20 multinationals, including Maersk (officially A.P. Møller-Maersk), brewer Carlsberg, pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk and water pump manufacturer Grundfos. In an inverse of the North American model – where companies set up foundations to run arm’s-length philanthropic projects in their names – Danish enterprise foundations run their companies, by holding a majority of their shares, voting rights or both. (Enterprise foundations exist outside of Denmark as well – Ikea in Sweden, Bosch in Germany, Rolex in Switzerland, Tata in India to name a few – but Denmark is home to the highest concentration.)

As Thomsen explains, enterprise foundations are, by their very nature, inclined to invest more in research, be better employers and perform more responsibly on environmental and social fronts than their publicly owned peers. “The foundation has a dual purpose: to be a good long-term owner and to practise some form of philanthropy,” Thomsen says. “It can’t be schizophrenic. It can’t very well exploit its labour force, then turn around and donate to poverty reduction.”

The prevalence of enterprise foundations in Denmark has shaped its economy in fundamental ways. For one, it has meant that the country’s 1% has been less tempted to participate in extravagant personal (and carbon-intensive) consumption – private jets, fancy cars, holiday homes and the like – and more likely to invest in a family enterprise or foundation that will outlive them. (Thomsen says the enterprise foundation model is, in large part, a function of Denmark’s historically high wealth taxes.) It has also meant that Danish companies have been more committed to long-term, collective gain than most – from Carlsberg founder J.C. Jacobsen’s sharing of the discovery of yeast purification with brewers across Europe in 1883, through Maersk’s more recent investment in the research and development of technologies to accelerate shipping decarbonization.

The Danish model may be difficult to reproduce elsewhere, but it does serve as inspiration, as evidence of what can be made possible. When the Laura Maersk first launched, there was some grumbling about the future of decarbonized shipping, given the limited supply of green methanol. Last May, a joint Danish–Japanese consortium cut the ribbon on the world’s first commercial-scale green methanol plant in southern Denmark. Among the customers for its methanol, which is produced with renewable energy and carbon dioxide captured from waste incineration and biogas plants, as opposed to fossil fuels, are Novo Nordisk for its insulin injection pens and Lego for its plastic blocks. Laura was also at the plant’s opening, waiting to tank up.

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.  

The post The secret to Denmark’s clean energy excellence appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Scale is a challenge when it comes to disclosure. There are around 6,000 cooperatives in Canada, about half of which are non-profits, and many are quite small. They don’t necessarily have the resources to bring a standardized process around sustainability into their operations, Duguid says.

Recognizing the lack of data and the intrinsic barriers, Duguid and fellow researcher Daphne Rixon asked themselves, “Could we help co-ops to do this better?” Together, they set out to build a dashboard to capture the performance of Canadian cooperatives with respect to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the cooperative principles.

The aim is to create an easy-to-use sustainability tool that enables co-ops to better understand their own sustainability performance and impact and share the results publicly, without adding a lot of work. The platform, called ACT (Accounting for Co-operative Transformation), is backed by the Centre of Excellence in Accounting and Reporting for Co‑operatives at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax and will launch next year.

Work by the Corporate Knights research group confirmed the limited visibility on sustainable impact at Canadian cooperatives. Out of more than 140 co-ops or credit unions in Canada with annual revenues exceeding $5 million in 2023 or 2024, researchers found that only 11 reported their sustainable investments and revenue. Ranked by sustainable impact, five of the top 10 were credit unions, which have more advanced sustainability reporting because they operate in the financial sector.

Sustainable impact at smaller co-ops can’t be measured by the same standard as it is at large credit unions, Duguid suggests. “It wouldn’t be fair to the co-op sector to think that a small bike co-op, for example, should be investing sustainably,” she says. “Their raison d’être is to provide sustainable transportation, and that should speak more than their investments.”

Sustainability Solutions Group (SSG) is a prime example of the tension between the commitment to sustainability and the absence of data-driven recognition for this work. Founded in 2001 in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia, the worker cooperative generates greenhouse gas inventories and climate action plans for cities, provinces and states across Canada, the United States and Chile. But with only 50 employees/members, most of whom work from home, the company doesn’t have the capacity to publish a sustainability report.

Despite the lack of clarity surrounding sustainable impact, no one doubts the deep links between the cooperative sector and sustainability. “Most co-ops were invested in sustainability long before it became fashionable,” says Daniel Brunette, senior director of cooperation and engagement at Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. Recognizing the critical role that co-ops play toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives.

Cooperatives are a huge part of the economy. So where’s the training?

Yuill Herbert, founder of SSG, says that the co-op’s shared-ownership model is intrinsically democratic and therefore more likely to pursue sustainable goals. “The co-op is the enterprise manifestation of sustainability,” he says.

Despite the existing core alignment with sustainability, the co-op sector still needs to get on board with reporting, Duguid says. “Co-ops should have been first off the mark with all the reporting about corporate social responsibility and ESG,” Duguid says. “Co-ops do really well in terms of social, economic and community [impact], but environmental can be hard for them to tackle.”

“They were doing that originally, and not just in a greenwashing way, but in a real way,” she says. “But they haven’t done a good job of talking about it.”

Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto. Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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The International Cooperative Alliance estimates that 280 million people – or about 10% of the world’s working population – are employed by co-ops. Collectively, the world’s three million cooperatives claim 12% of humanity as members. In 2023, the largest 300 cooperatives and mutuals together generated US$2.8 trillion in revenue, according to the World Cooperative Monitor.

But education for cooperative governance is not commensurate with the influence of co-ops. A study published in March highlighted the relative absence of cooperative education at business schools, not to mention in management and economics textbooks. The authors found that “the single most important non-mainstream business model, the co-op enterprise, is currently absent in most business schools most of the time.”

“You can do your MBA and never hear about co-ops,” says Daniel Brunette, a senior director at Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. The national association has done exercises around getting more co-op education in Canada, but setting up new academic programs at universities is a long, arduous undertaking. The only full graduate degrees offered in Canada are the master’s and graduate diplomas of management for co-operatives and credit unions at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia. Other schools allow students to specialize in cooperatives.

Even in Quebec, which has the most developed cooperative culture in Canada and whose 3,000 co-ops represent some 14% of the province’s economy, many business schools barely mention them, says Rafael Ziegler, a specialist in sustainability management and the director of the Institut international des coopératives Alphonse-et-Dorimène-Desjardins (IICADD) at HEC (Hautes études commerciales) Montréal.

The institute is home to the Portail Co-op, an online library devoted to cooperatives and mutuals, which was developed in part to help address the paucity of cooperative education.

A one-of-a-kind archive

Alphonse Desjardins, the godfather of the credit union movement in Canada, understood the importance of this kind of information-sharing. It was only through contacts in Europe that he came to understand the people’s savings and credit systems that were sweeping the continent in the late 19th century. And after establishing North America’s first credit union in Lévis, Quebec, in 1909, he spent much of the rest of his life explaining – in lectures, articles and letters – how the model could be adapted to different contexts to protect the interests of Quebec’s working and rural classes.

It is fitting that Portail Co-op was made possible by a donation from the Desjardins Group, which is now North America’s largest financial cooperative. Ziegler believes that, with its dedicated librarian and technician, the repository is the only one of its kind in the world.

At HEC Montréal, where Ziegler teaches, the cooperative form is integrated into courses across the program, particularly as it relates to sustainability and the circular economy, subjects that attract significant interest. He sees this as an auspicious confluence, as the values of today’s students are increasingly aligned with those of cooperatives.

The return of the collective economy

Part of the idea behind the Portail is to create an institutional memory for the cooperative movement; its technician spends much of her time digitalizing archival material, from photographs to newsletters to financial reports.

The library’s other function is to offer co-op members and researchers access to the widest possible array of relevant documents. The Portail covers 150 years of cooperative history, in 36 languages and from 84 countries.

Working together with Cooperatives and Mutuals Canada and the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation, the library curates thematic collections about issues and trends like climate change and digital services. “Obviously, we work as cooperatively as possible to distribute the library’s content,” Ziegler says.

Business schools should pay more attention to co-ops, Brunette says, because they breed resilience by their very nature. “The beauty and challenge of collective entrepreneurship is that you have to get people around the same table,” he says. “And that’s how you’ll weather the storms.”

Cooperatives are also much more territorially anchored, Ziegler points out, so they are unlikely to move elsewhere for a competitive advantage. In an era of escalating trade threats and multiplying crises, domestic rootedness is its own kind of asset.

Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto. Mark Mann is the managing editor at Corporate Knights.

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“Co-ops are by their very nature Canadian-owned and deeply grounded in their communities,” says Fiona Duguid, an expert in community economic development who teaches in the co-operative management program at Saint Mary’s University and the MBA program at Cape Breton University. “The current moment is ripe.”

Financial cooperatives represent one sector in which the tariff threat has served to accelerate an established trend of consolidation and growth. Over the last 30 years, the universe of Canadian credit unions has seen a rash of mergers and acquisitions that have enabled institutions to pool resources and invest in the technologies required to compete with the bigger banks.

Because of the digital transformation, there are enormous centralization tendencies.

– Rafael Ziegler, Associate Professor, HEC Montréal

In this period, the total number of credit unions in Canada has contracted considerably, shrinking from 1,421 in 1989 to only 184 last year. Meanwhile, the volume of assets they manage has increased tenfold, reaching roughly $315 billion in 2024.

Now, as the federal government works to break down interprovincial trade barriers, the Canadian Credit Union Association is lobbying to facilitate these mergers and acquisitions, particularly between unions in different provinces. As matters currently stand, credit unions that are provincially incorporated have trouble retaining members who move to or do business in other provinces.

Being able to operate interprovincially, or to join forces with federal credit unions, would vastly expand the appeal and reach of many credit unions. In the last year, Conexus has announced a merger with two other Saskatchewan credit unions, which will take effect in January, and Van City has entered merger discussions with fellow B.C. credit union First Union.

Extending the local edge

A traditional strength of credit unions like Desjardins is that they have a lot of local branches and are very present in their home regions, says Rafael Ziegler, director of the Institut international des coopératives Alphonse-et-Dorimène-Desjardins at HEC Montréal. “They have a competitive advantage due to proximity,” he says. “The idea is that [credit unions] know their customers better because they’re there, which creates a kind of reciprocity that other financial institutions don’t have to the same extent.”

But this advantage deteriorates as more banking moves online. “Because of the digital transformation, there are enormous centralization tendencies,” Ziegler observes.

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Local presence remains a differentiator for credit unions, even as they seek to grow inter-provincially. In addition to expanding their footprints, credit unions are stepping into the vacuums that banks leave behind as they reduce their brick-and-mortar presence in an increasingly cashless world.

Such was the case on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island, where, in 2022, islanders were left with no banking option after Scotiabank closed its doors after 150 years. The municipality rallied and successfully persuaded Atlantic Edge Credit Union to open a branch there.

“This is a happy space for them,” Duguid says, adding that credit unions often serve an older, rural clientele that may otherwise be left behind by the big banks.

With additional files by Mark Mann

Naomi Buck is a writer based in Toronto.

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The resentment fuelling this campaign, for which nobody took responsibility, was widely shared. In the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, as post-pandemic food price inflation peaked, the three grocery conglomerates that control the majority of the food retail market in Canada – Loblaw, Empire (owner of Sobeys) and Metro – were turning record profits, as their executives pocketed bonuses in the millions. All that in the wake of revelations that they had been colluding to fix the price of bread over a 14-year period. 

Today, as the ongoing trade war with the United States drives food prices up even further, many Canadians approach the grocery store with some combination of anxiety, dread and rage. But a small subset feels quite differently. 

“Spending money on food feels like an investment to me,” says Jon Steinman, a resident of Nelson, B.C., and author of the 2019 book Grocery Story: The Promise of Food Co-ops in the Age of Grocery Giants. 

Steinman is an enthusiastic participant in the cooperative food economy, which accounts for some 4% of Canada’s total grocery market, according to the Retail Council of Canada. And he believes that now, as Canadians express their patriotism in the grocery aisles, seeing their consumer habits as political choices, the food co-op’s moment may have truly come. “Many Canadians talk about the need for greater food sovereignty or security,” Steinman says, “without realizing that they could actually have ownership of the system.” 

Born and raised in Toronto, Steinman was oblivious to the co-op concept – which was not even mentioned in the bachelor of commerce degree he did at the University of Guelph – until he moved to British Columbia in the early 2000s to work in the wine industry. On a stop in Nelson, a former mining town in the Selkirk Mountains, he found himself listening with interest to the local radio station. When he learned that it was run as a co-op, he began volunteering. Soon he was hosting the morning news show. Then he discovered that his favourite grocery store in town was also member-owned; he paid his $50 and joined the Kootenay Co-op. Before long, Steinman had dropped his wine plans and committed himself to Nelson’s vibrant cooperative economy.

Read more from our collective economy series

What appealed to Steinman about the Kootenay Co-op is the most distinctive feature of co-ops generally: their ability to reflect the needs and priorities of their customers, who are also their owners. If affordability is an issue, a co-op may vote – and many do – to apply all profits above a certain threshold to lowering prices. If business is booming and demand growing, it may opt to expand. If national sovereignty is under threat, it may elect to reconsider its suppliers. 

So why have food co-ops not made bigger inroads into the Canadian food economy? Many living in central Canada barely have access to them (Toronto, for instance, has only two), while Western Canadians may take them for granted, forgetting that the iconic red Co-op brand in fact belongs to Federated Co-operatives Limited, the largest non-financial co-op in Canada, which operates gas stations, car washes and liquor, food and convenience stores. And misconceptions about co-ops abound. For many, the term suggests added expense and effort, or a sense that they are buying into something ideological, less profit-driven and therefore inefficient. 

But consider the Swiss example. In the business-friendly banking capital of the world, 80% of the grocery market is controlled by two co-ops: Coop and Migros, respectively the 34th and 41st largest retailers in the world, according to Deloitte’s most recent ranking. Both have more than two million members – membership is free to all Swiss citizens – and play a significant and progressive role in Swiss life. It was thanks in large part to Migros that Swiss women earned the right to vote federally in 1971 – the co-op was the campaign’s largest corporate backer, advertising its support on its shopping bags – and it has, since 1957, contributed 1% of its turnover to cultural and social projects. Both Migros and Coop have been pioneers in launching organic product lines and discontinuing the use of plastic bags. 

Now everyone is talking about buying Canadian, but we’ve been having that conversation for eons.

— Daniel Brunette, director of external affairs, Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada

As in Switzerland, the majority of Canada’s food co-ops grew out of agricultural co-ops: established by dairy producers in the late 19th century and Western grain farmers in the early 20th century. Then there was the more recent wave, inspired by the “Small is beautiful” economic and natural food movements of the 1970s, to which the Kootenay Co-op belongs. Frustrated by the high prices and limited selection of corporate chains, a small group of Nelson locals formed a buyers’ club, purchasing bulk staples with an emphasis on local and unprocessed foods. Today, the Kootenay Co-op, which operates out of a building on Nelson’s main drag, has more than 16,000 members and does roughly $28 million in sales annually, making it Canada’s largest independent natural foods co-op. 

Beyond providing a grocery supply aligned with its membership’s values – fair labour practices, organic, Canadian – Steinman says the co-op has served as an incubator for the local food system. The soft winter wheat used in the pumpkin butter tarts he just baked, he tells me, came from the nearby Creston Valley; the grain farmers in that region had been growing for export and the mass market until the co-op approached them and offered a local customer base. Likewise, the co-op provides grants and donations to local producers and supports local cultural initiatives; overall, Steinman says, it strengthens the local economy in a way that outlives electoral cycles. 

In a time of exceptional geopolitical and economic volatility, the timing does seem ripe. “Now everyone is talking about buying Canadian,” says Daniel Brunette, director of external affairs for Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada, “but we’ve been having that conversation for eons. The biggest hurdle to co-ops is the perception that they’re some kind of marginal alternative. They’re not. They’re a very well-established practice in this country. They happen whenever people come together around a common need.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Has the food co-op’s moment finally arrived? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Rather than throw in the towel, they pooled their resources, bought the leftover workout machines, rented a cheaper building on the edge of town, and opened the Kincardine Ladies Fitness Co-operative. It’s still going strong today.

Throughout history, co-ops have filled such voids: picking up where governments or companies or services have left off. But there’s a growing sense that, at this moment, co-ops could and should be playing a much more active role in the global economy. The United Nations declared 2025 the International Year of Cooperatives, highlighting the potential of cooperatives to help deliver on its largely unfulfilled Sustainable Development Goals as the clock ticks down to 2030. 

Some 12% of humanity today belongs to a co-op and the numbers are growing, according to the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), the Brussels-based body established in 1895 to represent cooperatives the world over. In an era of rising wealth disparity, autocracy and geopolitical instability, the values at the root of the cooperative model – democratic, community-based, fundamentally decent – would seem to be in short supply and high demand.

Democratizing prosperity

The cooperative movement traces its roots to the northern English town of Rochdale where, in 1844, a group of weavers who had been marginalized by the industrial revolution banded together to establish a shop that sold basic foodstuffs at affordable prices. Customers were also part owners; they had a say in the shop’s management and shared in the profits that eventually flowed. 

At roughly the same time, Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, the mayor of a small town in the German Rheinland, set up what would become the world’s first credit union – a financial cooperative – to offer indebted farmers reasonable loans. The rejection of self-interested, far-away market forces, investment in community and insistence on democratic decision-making remain at the core of the cooperative identity. 

Today, co-ops are often hidden in plain sight; the Associated Press, Best Western Hotels and Ocean Spray are all cooperative fixtures in their respective industries. And contrary to common conception, they often operate for profit: 42% of Canadian co-ops fall into this category. The model has leant stability to many agricultural sectors, from French wine to Italian parmesan to Canadian dairy, and has long protected the interests of certain worker groups, from seafood producers in Alaska to construction workers in Kerala, India. But it is the role cooperatives are playing in innovating and expanding vital sectors like affordable housing and renewable energy that has sparked renewed interest. 

Cooperatives emerged during the golden age of traditional capitalism. What we’re seeing now feels like the end stage of capitalism. And I think co-ops may be the next big story.

— Jeroen Douglas, director general, International Cooperative Alliance 

Last year, Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain announced plans to double the size of the country’s cooperative economy, in large part to stimulate growth in community-owned renewable-energy projects and to help the country reach its goal of a clean power grid by 2030. Decentralized technologies like wind and solar photovoltaic power are ideal vehicles for community ownership, allowing citizens to literally buy in to clean energy production. In 2000, when Denmark launched what was, at the time, the world’s largest offshore wind farm project, the government invited Danish citizens to participate; the Middelgrunden Wind Turbine Cooperative raised half of the project’s construction costs and continues to own half of the project. Wind energy in Denmark – now the source of most of the country’s electricity – has been built on the cooperative model; since 2009, Danish law has mandated that 20% of all new projects be community-owned. 

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“The beauty of renewable energy is that you can make your own,” says Chris Caners, general manager of SolarShare, which owns and operates more than 50 solar installations across Ontario. “It’s the democratization of energy, and it goes hand in hand with the democratization of business.” Since its founding in 2010, SolarShare has grown to more than 2,000 members, who have collectively invested some $80 million through solar bonds; by installed capacity, it is now Canada’s largest renewable-energy co-op. 

Co-ops will also be part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis. Across major Canadian cities, rents in cooperative housing are on average 33% lower than private-sector market units. The Canadian government recently announced a $1.5-billion Cooperative Housing Development Program, which is providing loans and contributions to new and existing housing co-ops (see “Housing” story, page 33). 

A new era for the co-op economy

Despite such advances, cooperative advocates lament an ongoing lack of support for the model. Daniel Brunette, director of external affairs for Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada, says this is a matter of political will. He cites Quebec, home of Canada’s largest cooperative financial services group, Desjardins, as one of the world’s most favourable jurisdictions for co-ops, where financing and insurance are readily available and cooperative associations receive consistent government support.

“In the 1970s, the provincial government really wanted to empower communities and the social economy generally,” Brunette says on the phone from Gatineau. It is no coincidence that 45% of Canada’s co-ops are located in Quebec – nor that several of the world’s most established cooperative cultures are to be found in similarly distinct societies, like Mondragon in the Basque Country of Spain and Italy’s Emilia-Romagna.

Many consider the untapped potential of the cooperative as a function of its image problem. “The Eastern Bloc regimes really soiled the concept of collective enterprise,” Brunette says, referring to a sense that co-ops are inefficient, slow-moving and ideologically encumbered. “When you say ‘co-op,’ many Canadians think of the three Hs: hay, housing and health food.” The attitude is not limited to Canada. At a recent conference in Britain, cooperative business adviser Alex Bird said he’s constantly fighting the perception that “co-ops are for people with stripy jumpers and sandals, not for normal people.”

Many consider the untapped potential of the cooperative as a function of its image problem. But those who harbour such attitudes may be left in the dust.

But those who harbour such attitudes may be left in the dust. In 2022, the United Arab Emirates passed a law designed to promote growth of the cooperative economy from 1% to 5% of its national non-oil gross domestic product, encouraging its expansion into non-traditional sectors including healthcare, education and the digital economy. Authority over cooperative regulation passed from the ministry of social affairs to the ministry of the economy in a bid to stimulate a more commercial approach: among other provisions, the law allows cooperatives to list and trade their shares on the country’s financial markets. Since its passing, the country’s cooperative sector has seen 8% growth. 

Meanwhile on the global stage, the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) has convened a group of executives representing the world’s 50 largest cooperatives – the CM50 – which will attend the UN World Summit for Social Development this November in Doha. “We will present ourselves as the obvious partner to the UN,” ICA director general Jeroen Douglas says, noting that only 17% of the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals have been met.

“Cooperatives emerged during the golden age of traditional capitalism,” Douglas says on the phone from his garden cottage in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. “What we’re seeing now feels like the end stage of capitalism. And I think co-ops may be the next big story.” 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post The return of the collective economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

When most Canadians hear the name Ken Dryden, for instance, they think hockey. And for good reason. Four decades after the legendary Montreal Canadiens goalie retired his pads for good, many still consider him the GOAT. Standing at six foot four, the “four-storey goalie” played only eight seasons in the National Hockey League, but his performance was unparalleled: six Stanley Cup wins and a .922 save percentage, making him a five-time winner of the Vezina Trophy, awarded annually to the NHL goalie who lets in the fewest goals.  

But later in life, Dryden played a pivotal role in a very different arena: paving the way for a national system of childcare that is set to become an integral part of this country’s social fabric. And while the trajectory from hockey to childcare may seem anything but obvious, it makes sense in the context of a life lived in pursuit of a greater good.   

In fact, the most remarkable aspect of Dryden’s hockey career is, arguably, not how he played, but how he regarded it: not as an end, but as a beginning. While he loved the sport from the get-go, he never expected it to define him. Growing up in Etobicoke, a suburb of Toronto, Dryden’s greatest aspiration was to the thing his parents did not have: a university education. With that, he wanted to become a lawyer, the profession attached to the important people he read about in the newspaper. And with that, he wanted to work for the government. “I always thought of government as an ultimate career,” says the 77-year-old Dryden, speaking on the phone from his home in midtown Toronto. “It was the thing you did after many others – once you had come to an understanding of why things are the way they are.”

Never losing sight of this larger goal, Dryden’s path followed the arc of his childhood imaginings. When he was first drafted to the NHL at the age of 17, he opted instead to spend those valuable learning years at Cornell University in New York, doing an undergraduate degree in history. After joining the Canadiens in 1971, he managed to combine professional goaltending with a law degree at McGill University. And when the contract the Canadiens offered him in 1973 was not to his liking, he turned it down and spent the year articling for a law firm instead.  

Dryden’s commitment to education endured. Five years after retiring from the Canadiens in 1979, he was appointed Ontario’s first youth commissioner, an experience that confirmed for him the importance of schooling to long-term success. He also wrote two books on hockey – genre-defying reflections on the demands of sport and its role in the Canadian imagination – before returning, remarkably, to high school. In September of 1993, at the age of 46, Dryden enrolled at T.L. Kennedy High School in suburban Mississauga, to spend a year in careful observation. The book that resulted, In School, explores the inner workings of a system that, as he puts it today, “is so central to how we live and who we become.”  

As planned, Dryden did ultimately enter politics. After winning the Liberal seat in York Centre in the federal election of 2004, he was invited to serve as minister of social development in Paul Martin’s government. The focus of this ministry – and a key plank of Martin’s election campaign – was to deliver the country’s first-ever universal childcare system.  

The childcare movement in Canada was already decades old, and Dryden entered the conversation from the outside and with his own take. Dryden’s year at T.L. Kennedy and his own experience as a father had solidified the convictions of his own upbringing. “When you see a light go off in a kid’s eyes, it’s magic,” he says. “If it doesn’t, it’s tragic.” Why would a public education system be considered so self-evidently necessary, but not childcare?

Dryden’s core ambition was to establish a system that would last. Within months of being named minister, he was invited to Winnipeg to attend the third national conference on childcare, where he met Martha Friendly, founder of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit at the University of Toronto and one of Canada’s fiercest childcare advocates. She credits Dryden for setting the bar for the work that lay ahead. “He said, ‘We need to get the system so in place that we’re painted into a corner and it can’t ever be removed.’ I still quote that today.”  

I always thought of government as an ultimate career. It was the thing you did after many others – once you had come to an understanding of why things are the way they are.

— Ken Dryden

Within two years, Dryden had accomplished the closest thing Canada had ever seen to a national childcare program: bilateral agreements with all 10 provinces to develop their own childcare systems. Dryden considered himself “the luckiest guy in government” to have such a purposeful mission, as all around him Martin’s minority government was crumbling. After it fell in a non-confidence vote, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, having won the election to follow, were quick to terminate the childcare agreements and replace the Liberals’ plans with the Canada Child Benefit – a monthly cheque to parents in lieu of a childcare system. 

“A lot of people called this crushing,” Dryden recalls. “But I knew it would come back. It was one of those lose now, win forever situations.” He was right. Some 20 years later, under the exceptional circumstance of a pandemic – with families stretched to the limit and government support flowing freely – Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced a $10-a-day nationwide childcare program. 

Dryden acknowledges that while the system is far from perfect, and was a long time in the making, what matters is that it happened. The same goes, he says, for all fights worth fighting, from concussion in sport to climate change, a cause that he has mobilized behind in recent years. Dryden helped design a multidisciplinary undergraduate course on climate action for his alma mater, McGill, which launched in the fall of 2022. 

“Don’t underestimate your power,” he told students in the course’s inaugural lecture. “My generation reports to you.”

This year, Corporate Knights honoured Dryden with its 2025 Award of Distinction. Past recipients include former federal NDP leader Tom Mulcair, former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty and former B.C. premier Gordon Campbell. 

The post Ken Dryden’s long game appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The road to vehicular electrification seems to be paved with both great ambition and serious bumps. A heady optimism surrounded EVs after Tesla launched its first highway-legal roadster in 2008. In the decade to follow, manufacturers rushed to introduce their own models as the market took off. 

But global sales have slowed in recent years. The exuberance of early adopters has been replaced by the more rational, cost-conscious calculations of mainstream buyers. In some places, incentivizing subsidies have been dropped and charging infrastructure has lagged. Meanwhile, the massive Chinese market has shown more interest in its own brands than Western imports. 

All of this volatility has led many brands – Volvo, GM, Ford, Tesla and Mercedes among them – to walk back on their ambitions: retracted promises of all-electric fleets, reduced capital investment in their EV lines and resurrected conventional models.

But not Jaguar. The British luxury brand is moving in the other direction. As of 2026, it will sell nothing but electric cars. The bold move is part of a complete rebrand by parent company Jaguar Land Rover, which is ditching its emblematic leaping feline, diversifying its portfolio to four brands (Jaguar, Range Rover, Defender and Discovery) and moving Jaguar from the premium segment into the even more rarefied territory of super-luxury. 

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Rawdon Glover, managing director at Jaguar since March 2023, is addressing the company’s sagging sales with a complete reboot. All of Jaguar’s existent models (including its EV, the I-Pace) are being discontinued while it enters a kind of one-year dormancy, with no new sales this year. In 2026, it intends to re-emerge with three entirely new, all-electric models: a four-door grand tourer called the Type OO, which made its real-world debut in Paris in March, and two SUVs, none of which will cost less than US$155,000.

All three are expected to offer all-wheel drive, fast charging (10% to 80% in roughly 13 minutes) and ranges around 700 kilometres. The company will also be offering its EV clients a suite of services, including memberships in supercharging-station clubs, designer wallbox chargers for their homes and an exclusive drive-share program.

Glover’s strategy for rescuing the Jaguar brand seems to be more about profitability than sustainability, but there’s nothing wrong with that. “Luxury brands create irrational need,” Glover told Britain’s Top Gear magazine last year. “No one needs a Hermès work bag.” Nor does anybody need an ultra-luxury car, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have the EV marketed as an object of desire.

Time will tell if Jaguar’s wager pays off. Industry insiders believe that by narrowing its portfolio and targeting a very select clientele, Jaguar will reap higher returns. If it does, it will have paved at least one viable path to an EV-only future. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer who focuses on the issues that will most impact the next generation: sustainability and education. 

The post Jaguar reinvents itself with all-electric gamble appeared first on Corporate Knights.

According to those who study consumer habits, millennials and Gen Zs are looking for two things when they go shopping: sustainability and individuality. One jewellery company is capturing hearts and wallets by offering both.

Pandora, launched as a family-run jewellery shop in Copenhagen in 1982, has grown to become the world’s largest jewellery maker, by pieces sold. And unlike much of its industry in recent years, Pandora’s star is rising. As competitors like Tiffany and Signet see diminishing returns, Pandora ended 2024 with 31.7 billion krone (US$4.5 billion) in annual revenue, representing 13% organic growth.

These figures reflect a major turnaround. In 2019, following several years of declining sales, Pandora embarked on a new strategy: to expand its product line beyond the luxury charm bracelets for which it had become famous and go all in on sustainability. It established three new priorities: to decarbonize, push circularity and promote a more diverse corporate culture.

Six years later, Pandora’s charms, which can be engraved and assembled to create personalized pieces, are just one element in its full palette of fine jewellery. And the company is aspiring to the highest sustainability standards in its field. Since 2021, it has used only lab-grown diamonds – to avoid concerns about blood diamonds and inhumane labour practices – and since 2024, exclusively gold and silver in recycled form. 

According to Mads Twomey-Madsen, Pandora’s senior vice president of sustainability, the transition to recycled metals took four years to complete and required 100 additional staff: a relatively small investment for a company with some 37,000 employees worldwide.

More than 40 of Pandora’s suppliers – both smelters and producers of clasps and chains – had to change their processes to meet its new standards (which are issued by the Responsible Jewellery Council), but they were persuaded to do so by the volumes in question.

Pandora claims that its annual purchase of roughly 340 tons of recycled silver, sourced from electronics, silverware, manufacturing waste and old jewellery, accounts for some 6% of the total global market. 

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The shift away from newly mined metals will reduce greenhouse gas emissions across its supply chain by 58,000 metric tons annually by the company’s estimates: roughly the equivalent of taking 6,000 gas-powered cars off the road. It’s also costing Pandora some US$10 million annually, largely in premiums paid to suppliers to help them adjust. It’s “a cost we are willing to absorb” Pandora CEO Alexander Lacik told The New York Times last year.

While sustainability may be front of mind for younger buyers, Lacik admits that the average jewellery shopper is looking primarily at design and price. But even if customers weren’t clamouring for it, Pandora’s sustainability push has proven a sound business decision; according to its 2024 annual report, the company has grown by 45% since 2019. No doubt, others in the industry are watching with interest. 

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post Pandora’s big bet on sustainability pays off appeared first on Corporate Knights.

On a grey day in November 2009, a motley crew of German environmentalists paraded across a square in downtown Copenhagen carrying a massive, inflated dinosaur whose torso was a black chimney spewing black balloons. Over megaphones, they explained that their “coalosaurus” protest was directed at the coal-fired power plant that Danish energy giant DONG intended to build on Germany’s Baltic coast.

Local Copenhageners biking to work seemed to be paying no attention, but DONG was. The company, which had been established by the Danish government in 1972 as Dansk Naturgas with a mission to develop oil and gas resources in the North Sea, had grown to become the country’s main supplier of power, and in 2009, that supply was still largely rooted in coal and gas. 

For DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas), the coalosaurus was not the only sign that something had to change. In 2009, Copenhagen played host to COP15, and the irony was writ large: a climate conference held in a country whose state-owned power system was one of the most carbon-intensive in the world. Furthermore, the economics of fossil fuels were rapidly changing. As climate consciousness grew and the price of natural gas fell, DONG’s S&P credit rating slid into the negative.

The company embarked on one of the most radical – and successful – corporate transformations of all time. Having announced its intentions the previous year, DONG cancelled its coal plant plans in 2009 and launched a program to flip its energy mix to 85/15 renewables/fossil fuels within a generation. It ended up accomplishing that feat in a decade. 

To do so, it went all in on offshore wind energy. As an emerging market, offshore wind was expensive to produce – twice the cost of onshore – but as DONG divested of its fossil fuel assets, it put all of its resources into optimizing every aspect of offshore construction and operation. It began investing in, buying and developing offshore farms across Europe and the United States.

Having sold off the last of its oil and gas production business in 2017, DONG changed its name to Ørsted, after the 18th-century Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered the connection between electricity and magnetism.

By 2019, Ørsted owned 30% of the global market in offshore wind energy, with farms in Denmark, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Taiwan. That year, Corporate Knights crowned it the world’s most sustainable energy company. While it still gets some revenue from the distribution of fossil-fuel-derived energy, 91% of Ørsted’s earnings aligned with the European Union’s taxonomy of sustainable activities in 2024, the same year it closed its last coal-fired power plant. 

Ørsted’s transformation was remarkable not only in its speed and scale. In 2016, the company went public on the Copenhagen stock exchange in a US$15-billion initial public offering: at the time, the world’s second biggest ever. Its stock price soared, with the company’s market value peaking in 2021 at more than US$95 billion.

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In recent years, Ørsted has faced headwinds – inflation, higher interest rates and the supply chain breakdown that resulted from the pandemic. Donald Trump’s January announcement that “we are not going to do the windmill thing” and subsequent dismantling of green infrastructure funding further threaten Ørsted’s U.S. projects.

But the company is open about the challenges it has faced; it shares a white paper on its website detailing lessons learned along the way, and the ongoing case for offshore wind. And it remains steadfast in its mission, in the words of former CEO Mads Nipper, “to prove that there is no long-term trade-off between sustainability and financial value creation.”

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.

The post How Orsted ditched coal and became a titan of offshore wind appeared first on Corporate Knights.