That new reality is evident in the business world’s response to the snowballing Black Lives Matter movement. Polling indicated that most Americans were opposed to BLM when it started taking hold in 2013. But in the weeks following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May, BLM supporters had come to outweigh opponents by 28 percentage points, according to a survey by Civiqs, an online research firm.

Business reaction has hardened from feel-good statements against racism to more tangible measures with a longer-lasting impact. Netflix has promised to earmark 2% of its cash holdings – up to US$100 million – for banks to “directly support Black communities in the US.” That’s in addition to the US$120 million that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings donated to historically Black colleges and universities two weeks prior. Netflix has also added a Black Lives Matter genre to its lineup, celebrating the work of Black artists and Black history.

The power of social media has undoubtedly played a key role in shaping the response. Three of the United States’ biggest retailers – Walmart, Walgreens and CVS – said they would no longer display African-American beauty products behind locked glass after Twitter lit up with images of juxtaposed photos: one of easily accessible generic beauty products, the other of locked-away items aimed mainly at Black customers. One month later, Walmart also committed US$100 million over five years to create a new centre on racial equity.

Several companies have set specific targets for broader representation in their senior ranks.

Google, for example, has pledged to boost its leadership diversity by 30% within the next five years, in addition to pledging US$175 million to Black businesses and start-ups.

There is still a long way to go. While Black people make up about 13% of the U.S. population, they hold just 3.2% of executive and senior management positions and fewer than 1% of Fortune 500 CEO spots, according to the Center for Talent Innovation. Corporate Knights found that less than 1% of corporate leaders at TSX 60 companies are Black.

Zero

Yes, it is possible to go from Hero to Zero in a few short months. Just ask the workers at Walmart, Loblaws – Canada’s biggest supermarket chain – and the U.K.’s Tesco and Marks & Spencer, among others.

As the COVID-19 pandemic broke in early spring, food retailers lauded the contribution of cashiers, shelf-stackers and warehouse staff by jacking up their pay and benefits as compensation for the risks they were taking to get food to our tables. The typical raise was 10 to 15%, or about two dollars an hour.

Alas, Hero Pay did not last long.

By June, most of the companies had rolled back the increases. Loblaws chairman Galen Weston justified cancelling the “temporary pay premium” on the grounds that “things have now stabilized in our supermarkets and drugstores. After extending the premium multiple times, we are confident our colleagues are operating safely and effectively in a new normal.”

Some employers sought to soften the blow with other benefits. Loblaws added a one-time $160 bonus to workers’ July pay, pro-rated to a 40-hour work week. Walmart offered extra counselling services and higher staff discounts on purchases.

Not surprisingly, the workers, many of them at the bottom of the pay scale, are nonplussed. “The pandemic is not over,” noted Jerry Dias, the president of Unifor, Canada’s biggest private-sector union. “The danger has not passed. These workers are no less at risk and are no less essential today than they were yesterday.”

It’s not as if the employers could no longer afford to be generous. Empire Co., the Canadian group behind the Sobeys, FreshCo and Safeway chains, hiked its dividend less than a week after chopping its Hero Pay program. The company reported a 47% jump in net earnings for the quarter ended August 1.

Two dollars an hour may not be a huge amount of money – either for those giving or receiving it. But the extra wages did signal respect and appreciation for a group of workers who enjoy few other perks of corporate life and have exposed themselves to greater risks than most others outside the healthcare sector.

This was a perfect opportunity to narrow the widening gap in pay between those at the top and the bottom of the corporate ladder. Too bad that the grocers weren’t heroes for long.

The post Heroes & Zeros: Black Lives Matter vs. Loblaws appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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 as $2 to $3 an hour while working at breakneck pace in often unsafe conditions.

In Bangladesh, India, Cambodia, Kenya and other centres of textile production, workers have protested to regain their lost wages. But social media, which often exposes power imbalances, may prove the most effective tool for recouping the money the workers are owed.

Enter Remake, a California-based group of millennial and Gen Z designers and activists dedicated to “making fashion a force for good.” Galvanized by research published by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) and Penn State’s Center for Global Workers’ Rights, Remake, along with a a global network of  labour unions and labour rights advocates emerged to demand that brands pay factories the billions they owe. Under the hashtag #PayUp, Remake used Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to shame the big companies that have greatly profited from their poorly paid global supply chains.

Never underestimate the power of fashionistas: by the fall, 273,000 people had signed Remake’s petition, and Adidas, H&M, The Gap, Lululemon, Ralph Lauren and Primark were among the 21 brands removed from Remake’s hit list, by promising to pay for cancelled and in-production orders in full, and in a timely manner. Remake estimates this effort will recoup US$22-billion worth of payments for overseas suppliers – about half the total bill it believes the retailers incurred.

In October, Penn State and WRC released an updated research brief, Unpaid Billions, documenting US$16.2 billion in cancelled orders and retroactive price reductions by garment brands and retailers, noting, “The result has been a dramatic loss of income and jobs for millions of garment workers.”

Among the companies still holding out as of November: Arcadia (which owns Topshop), The Children’s Place, JCPenney, Oscar de la Renta, Urban Outfitters and TJX, which owns Marshalls, Winners and HomeSense in Canada. (See sidebar below.)

How do such inequities happen? Apparel buyers used to fund new inventory using letters of credit, which guaranteed payment – without delays or further haggling – once the products were shipped. But The Wall Street Journal reports that big brands abandoned that practice over the last decade, “opting instead for an open-account system – essentially an honor system –where factories trust retailers to pay after shipment.” Factory owners had little choice but to go along.

“In the Covid-19 crisis, this skewed payment system allowed western brands to shore up their financial position by essentially robbing their developing country suppliers,” director of the WRC and co-author of the study, Scott Nova, told The Guardian.

Remake founder and CEO Ayesha Barenblat recently issued a campaign update:

“Missing from all of these fashion conversations of building back better post COVID-19 are workers whose wages and safety continues to be in a free fall. But if we have something to do with it, CEOs of fashion brands and the billionaires behind them, cannot just slip back into polite society after the devastation they have caused.”

Barenblat announced that Remake is launching the next phase of PayUp Fashion, demanding that brands go beyond just paying up and also commit to keeping workers safe, boosting wages and supporting much-needed laws and regulations that put workers at the center of a stronger, more equitably fashion industry.

As Barenblat told Vogue in the summer, #PayUp’s success “illustrates the power of activists and citizens coming together to hold the fashion industry accountable.” However, she adds, “we will not rest until the industry commits to liveable wages and social protections for garment makers so that never again will women who make our clothes be pushed to the brink of starvation.”

The post If fashion brands to build back better they’ll have to #PayUp billions in unpaid wages appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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 put together,” says Jeremy Coller, founder of the London-based FAIRR Initiative, a US$25-trillion global investor network that studies the environmental, social and governance risks of industrial livestock production. FAIRR made headlines with a recent report that estimated that new carbon taxes could cost 40 global meat companies up to US$11.6 billion in profits by 2050.

Coller, a private-equity investor turned activist, positions FAIRR’s findings as a warning to investors: “In the post-COVID landscape there is a risk that governments may stop subsidizing animal agriculture, and start taxing it instead.”

The report identified “gathering momentum” among policy-makers to apply carbon taxes to farm-animal emissions, which account for half of global agriculture’s total greenhouse gas emissions. A 2019 Lancet Commission report probing obesity, under-nutrition and climate change proposed taxing red meat, and the EU is reportedly considering a “sustainability charge” on meat to compensate for the industry’s carbon emissions, pollution, deforestation and biodiversity loss. A portion of those charges would be redirected to finance more sustainable agricultural practices and reduce the costs of plant-based agriculture.

New Zealand has already announced its intention to begin taxing emissions at the farm level. Given the complexities of measuring and pricing livestock emissions, payments won’t begin until 2025.

Tracking methane emissions down on the farm may seem an unpleasant business, but FAIRR believes the future of agriculture is grim either way. Its recent Livestock Levy report included a Climate Risk Tool to help investors calculate how agricultural producers will be affected by changing environmental factors such as the rising cost of animal feed, water-supply shortages, higher livestock mortality and infrastructure damage caused by “extreme weather events.”

FAIRR produced the tool because it says the meat and dairy sector is lagging behind in recognizing and managing the risks of climate change. As of 2019, it says, only 5% of leading meat companies had undertaken climate-scenario analysis and disclosure, versus 23% of oil and gas, mining and utility companies.

The post Where’s the beef tax? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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 a 6.5% higher average annual return versus their industry peers. Companies whose miserly pay packets landed them in the bottom quintile were found to earn 3% less than their industry peers.

According to researchers Charlie Mahoney and Steffen Bixby, these results disprove the Dickensian notion that business profitability stems from keeping wages low and reducing labour costs. “Leading research shows that investing in workers – raising wages and providing strong benefits – improves business outcomes,” they write. “As companies are developing strategies to weather the current recession, they should start by considering how to improve the financial security of their workforce.”

In a similar study, the authors analyzed companies that pay a “living wage”; that is, enough money to enable a family to cover their minimum needs – including food, childcare, health insurance, housing, clothing and transportation. Again, generosity paid off.

The second study found that over the past 12 months, the top quintile of companies doling out a “living wage” achieved 12.3% better performance compared to their industry peers. Even the flintiest companies in the bottom quintile of the living wage bracket performed 1.1% better than the industry average.

Just Capital hopes this heaping helping of common sense will encourage more employers to offer employees higher wages and benefits. “Years of research have found that workers who do not have to stress about things like whether they can afford a doctor’s visit or medication stay with their companies longer, and are more engaged,” Mahoney and Bixby say. “It’s expensive to replace an employee, and a more engaged workforce is more productive.”

But common sense is never common. Prior to the pandemic, compensation surveys indicated that employers in Canada and the U.S. were expected to boost pay this year by 3.3% – a rate largely unchanged over the past nine years.

The post Companies that pay fair wages weather downturn better appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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 manage to find the EV of their choice, here’s the kicker: even with the rock-bottom borrowing rates being offered on conventional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles during the pandemic, the costs of both financing and leasing remain higher for EVs than for similar ICE vehicles, in some cases by as much as 3.5%. As a result, monthly payments and total cost of borrowing are disproportionately high. For consumers who are already cost-conscious in the current economic climate and find higher EV sticker prices a stretch, their higher leasing and financing rates are likely to be a deterrent.

Why are EVs being left out in the cold?

Since the era of Model Ts, banks have been offering loans for car purchases on the assumption that if the borrower couldn’t repay a loan, the bank could seize the car and sell it for a residual value.

The hitch for EVs is that there’s not a lot of historical data available to establish reliable residual values. That leaves banks working with worst-case scenarios for depreciation. While that means higher financing rates, EV leasing rates are most significantly impacted because of the need to estimate buyout rates.

Corporate Knights looked at the purchase price of the Nissan Leaf, Chevy Bolt and Hyundai Kona, factoring in each province’s available rebates and delivery charges, to examine the differences between leasing and financing rates offered for EVs and ICEs. The calculations are based on having no trade-in vehicle and making no down payment, which would be unusual, and some automakers would require the latter, but doing so equalizes the represented figures as much as possible. The rates shown are promotional and subject to a credit check, meaning they may not be available to every customer. Estimated lease buyouts are calculated based on a 24,000-kilometre annual allowance. These quotes were provided by real dealerships and don’t factor in any negotiating that customers might do.

Bolt best on financing

Through our research, we found that Nissan offered the most extreme example of financing disparity. With the Nissan Leaf Plus, financing rates across Canada were quoted at 3.9% as of late August for both 60- and 84-month terms. In Ontario, where the amount to be borrowed is highest, at $52,571, including taxes and the $5,000 federal iZEV rebate, this equates to a monthly cost of $716 over 84 months, with a total cost of borrowing of $7,587. Reduce that term to 60 months at the same rate and the cost to borrow naturally goes down to $5,377, with a higher monthly charge of $966.

By contrast, in late August it was possible to finance a Nissan Murano ICE SUV for a much more enticing 1.9% over 84 months and 0% over 60 months. Were those same rates available to a Leaf Plus buyer, the 84-month monthly payment would be nearly $50 less, at $669, and the cost of borrowing goes down by more than half, to $3,615. At the 60-month term, where 0% financing means there’s no cost to borrow at all, the monthly payment goes down by $90 to $876.

Hyundai wasn’t much better. While the automaker was offering 0% financing for up to 84 months on many ICE vehicles for much of the summer, the Kona EV rates were quoted at 2.79%. A customer financing a Kona EV in Ontario would borrow a total of $50,356.44 with sales taxes, resulting in a payment of $660.61 per month. This is $54 more than if that same customer opted for a Hyundai Santa Fe Luxury, a much larger gas-guzzling SUV that’s very close on price, at $50,949.44, but with cheaper monthly payments thanks to the 0% financing available over the same term.

If Hyundai’s EV and ICE rates were on par, the monthly payment for the EV would be reduced by $62 a month in Ontario and $52 a month in Quebec. In B.C., financing rates were slightly higher for the ICEs we looked at; at a rate of 1.49% over 84 months, the difference in the monthly payment is $27 per month, and the cost to borrow is reduced by nearly half.

In contrast, General Motors was running a promotional financing rate of 1.99% on 2020 Bolt EVs in August, which was more on par with the ICE.

For reference, Canada’s most popular EV, the Tesla Model 3, can be financed at around 2.15%, with a required down payment of $2,500 and a usual wait time of two to three months.

Leasing lead

For leasing, 48 months is a common term. Again, Nissan had significantly higher rates than GM for the EVs in our research, with the Leaf Plus at 4.9% (monthly cost of $716 and a total of $6,413 in interest paid). Contrast that with the 1.9% lease rate over the same term on a Nissan Murano; a Leaf Plus at that rate would cost $636 per month and only $2,461 in total interest.

At Hyundai, the gap in lease rates is in some cases greater than with the Nissan Leaf Plus, but the monthly rates remain lower because of the lower up-front cost of the vehicle. A customer leasing a Kona EV in Quebec would pay $560 a month over 48 months at 4.99% for a total interest payment of $5,036; if that same buyer opts for an ICE Santa Fe, the rate goes down to 1.49%. Had the Kona EV customer been given that rate, the monthly cost becomes $488 (a $72 savings), while the overall interest paid would be significantly lower, at $1,486.

As of August, Tesla is finally offering leasing options to Canadians, at least in Alberta, B.C., Ontario and Quebec. The Model 3 requires a $2,500 down payment and comes with a leasing rate of 3.85%, which is higher than similarly priced ICE competitors such as the Mercedes-Benz C-Class, offered at a lease rate of 2.99%.

Bridging the gap

Fitting monthly payments into customer budgets is key to closing deals. The current higher financing and leasing rates for EVs, the on-paper difference in monthly payments and overall cost of borrowing between EVs and ICEs is wide enough to turn away all but the most determined EV shopper.

How can we start to narrow that gap? A Corporate Knights Building Back Better report proposed a government-led system of guaranteeing EV auto loans over three years. Doing so could be just as critical as rebates to meeting Canada’s EV sales targets of 10% of light-duty vehicles per year by 2025, 30% by 2030, and 100% by 2040, by making it possible for Canadians to purchase or lease EVs with monthly payments that are on par with their ICE-driving counterparts.

Advocates say that if Canada also implements a zero-emission vehicle standard that requires a gradually rising percentage of vehicles sold to be zero-emission (as Quebec does), more Canadians could start driving away with EVs, all without being taken for a ride.

Stephanie Wallcraft is a multiple-award-winning automotive journalist based in Toronto and is the president of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC).

The post The electric car you can’t buy or lease appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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, moving the dial on corporate diversity, equity and inclusion is complicated and slow going.

Corporate Knights analysis of 68 Toronto Stock Exchange companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue found that just eight had at least 10% racial diversity on both their boards and senior executive teams, including Canadian Solar Inc., BlackBerry Limited and Toronto-Dominion Bank (see table below for the top 10). More than a third (37%) of large publicly traded companies in Canada did not have a single racially diverse board member or senior executive. It’s a startling figure, considering that 27% of Canada’s population is racially diverse, with 5% of that being Indigenous.

A number of companies are scrambling to address racial inequities by hiring a chief diversity officer (CDO) or diversity and inclusion (D&I) manager. But between the politics, bureaucracy, fiefdoms and silos, one CDO or D&I manager – with little to no budget, limited staff and a reporting line that is levels down from the CEO – is hardly going to be heard, let alone redesign a system to change ingrained beliefs and power structures.

The ways in which systemic racism and bias are deeply rooted within corporations are not always easily identified or understood. In addition to Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC) being passed over for promotions more often and hired at levels far lower than their qualifications, in recent months racialized Canadians have publicly shared their experiences of microaggression in the workplace. I myself have had a C-suite executive assume that I had completed my doctorate degree at an Indian university, even though I’m Canadian. I was also told, by the same female executive, that there are not enough qualified women of colour. Meanwhile, there are more racialized professional women in Toronto than non-racialized professional women, yet non-racialized women still outnumber racialized women in corporate leadership roles 12 to 1, according to Ryerson University’s 2020 Diversity Institute study, Diversity Leads.

These types of comments may seem harmless; however, research indicates they have a powerful impact. Between 2016 and 2018, Catalyst, in association with Ascend Canada, surveyed men and women who identify as Black, East Asian or South Asian. The study found that people of colour carry an extra emotional burden at work that’s detrimental to their health and often causes them to contemplate quitting.

How can companies do better?

Making charitable contributions to organizations committed to serving diverse groups, supporting events that celebrate our vibrant and diverse communities, making pledges to increase board diversity, and announcing targets to increase the number of racialized employees by a specific percentage by a certain date – these are important and good starting points. However, we cannot brush off the hard, roll-up-your-sleeves, long-term work of creating a diverse workplace where all employees can bring their full selves to work, be engaged and productive, and feel that they are valued, supported and belong.

Map the right metrics

What types of data, metrics, actions and organizational structures enable us to create equitable and inclusive workplaces? First, collect data on gender, race, ethnicity, age and disability at each job level and analyze for hiring, promotions, terminations and departures. Pay data is already being collected; use this data to analyze salary gaps within and between jobs by gender, race, ethnicity, age and disability. In addition, consider conducting surveys that capture employees’ experiences and views on compensation, promotions, assignments, mentoring and performance reviews. Questions such as “Do you feel that people see you as a member of a racial group rather than a team member?” or “Do you feel that you have to prove yourself repeatedly to get the same recognition as your colleagues?” can provide answers about where bias occurs most often and what systems need to be improved.

Distribute skill-building

Every workplace has high-profile assignments that are career-enhancing and low-profile assignments that benefit an organization but not the individual’s career. Research indicates that racialized professionals are more often assigned low-profile work. Distributing high-profile and low-profile work equitably lets you tap into the full potential of your team and support individuals’ professional development goals as well as the team’s goals. Ask a junior colleague to chair team meetings and manage the agenda to create space for more dialogue and different perspectives. Diversity at the top can occur only when diverse employees at all levels of the organization have access to assignments that let them take risks and develop new skills.

Create belonging

To identify systemic issues in the workplace, we have to take steps to understand racialized people’s experiences in those spaces and use that knowledge to make changes that foster belonging. Pay attention to how biases show up in meetings and work proactively to address them. Keep track of the composition of the meetings – who speaks, who doesn’t. Has everyone had the opportunity to contribute? Sometimes before meetings I ask colleagues who are quieter if I can call on them. I want to ensure they have space to contribute without making them feel uncomfortable. Every time I’ve done this, the person has welcomed the opportunity to contribute and appreciated the space created for them.
Also, keep track of who gets credit for ideas versus who originated them and ensure that everyone with a part to play is at meetings. We can all recall a time when our ideas and work were credited to someone else, but racialized people experience this more frequently, racialized women in particular.

Go beyond HR

Beyond data and metrics, we need to acknowledge that the world is changing quickly and question whether traditional organizational structures enable the corporation to address emerging business priorities. In many conversations with racialized peers throughout my career, I have heard frustrations about not feeling heard by HR, feeling that HR was “on the side of the corporation, not employees.” Human resources departments are set up to manage risk, an important and necessary function; however, they may not be the right department to advance the diversity, inclusion and belonging agenda. It’s unrealistic to expect employees to see HR, the department that terminates employees, as also the department responsible for creating an equitable, engaging and inclusive workplace. If new ways of conducting business are to emerge, so too must new organizational reporting lines.

Chief diversity officers

Roughly half of S&P 500 companies now have chief diversity officers, according to The Wall Street Journal, which found that while demand for CDOs is high, so is turnover, with many CDOs leaving because of “a lack of resources, unrealistic expectations and inadequate support from senior executives.” Either the CDO must be empowered by the organization to make the systemic change it’s seeking or, as in the case of Neilsen’s David Kenny, the CEO should consider also taking on the CDO role.

Regardless, as corporations come face to face with disruption, leaders need to really listen to their teams, be willing to make the necessary changes, conduct themselves with compassion and put their people first. Diverse voices must actually be heard. This requires listening without preconceived notions, which sounds easy, but it requires empathy and a culture that truly values open communication.

We are at a moment in time when corporations are faced with an overwhelming demand for change. We have an opportunity to ensure that diversity flourishes throughout companies and to create a culture of belonging. As Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said [and] what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” In the corporations of the future, racialized employees must feel that they are included and that they belong.

The post How to fix corporate Canada’s trickle-down approach to diversity appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“It was the first of what would be most of the rest of my educational and professional career being one of the only minorities. I guess I learned how to deal with that early, and I see that as a positive,” Jackson says.

In high school, she applied for a summer program that pushed underrepresented minorities into science. There she listened to a young chemical engineer discuss her job designing a polymer used to make windshield glass shatterproof. “I remember the moment … I could see [engineering] applied to real life in a way that, in this particular case, actually helped save lives,” she says.

After getting a degree in chemical engineering from Yale and a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, Jackson’s love of teamwork and her impatience with solitary research jobs led her away from academia to a career in management consulting. A decade later she joined Capital One in Washington, D.C., first as senior director, then as vice-president. In 2018, she moved to Toronto to become president of Capital One Canada, becoming one of the only women – and even rarer, one of the only Black women – running a large Canadian corporation.

Despite rising to the top of the corporate world, Jackson says that being both Black and a woman has meant that she’s often been underestimated, passed over and excluded – and once even mistaken for waitstaff at a corporate event. “We’ve always been taught that we need to do twice as much work and work twice as hard to get the same things.”

Jackson says her science background comes in handy in the numbers-obsessed financial services industry and has also helped her build common ground, even when race and gender made her an outsider. “Ultimately, we have more in common than we have differences, even if that’s not always apparent. Sometimes it takes more conversation or personal exposure to get to that point,” she says.

With Jackson at the helm, Capital One Canada has tried to support young women of colour by sponsoring the annual Black Girl Magic Summit, which engages young women on entrepreneurship, financial and personal wellness, and money management.

Jackson’s advice to corporate leaders: “Ensure there’s a diversity plan. Be mindful of bias in our recruiting and development process, develop meaningful promotion and performance reviews. And then lead with empathy.”

Wes Hall

Founder of Kingsdale Advisors and the BlackNorth Initiative

Wes Hall learned early how to make it on his own. When he was 13, his mother packed all his things into a straw bag and kicked him out of their home, a tin shack in rural Jamaica. Hall earned money “selling peanuts on the street,” paying for his own food, clothing and school expenses, before moving to Canada to live with his father at 16.

Years later, that same determination propelled him to leave his job at the investor services firm Georgeson to start Kingsdale Advisors, a company dedicated to helping activist investors effect change within public companies. Working in corporate Canada, Hall says that he was never invited into any boardrooms, so he channelled his entrepreneurial drive and founded his own firm. “I wanted to create something … and control my own destiny,” he says.

He soon became one of Bay Street’s most powerful brokers, but he and his family continued to experience systemic anti-Black racism. After the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May, Hall felt compelled to write an op-ed in The Globe and Mail. He wrote of seeing Floyd when he looked in the mirror and called for the dismantling of systemic anti-Black racism. Numerous business leaders, including CIBC CEO Victor Dodig, reached out to him after reading the piece, asking how they could help.

With their support, Hall launched the BlackNorth Initiative, which urges businesses to support diversity, inclusion and the Black community. Their pledge was signed by more than 300 Canadian CEOs of companies representing a market cap of more than $1 trillion, including Capital One Canada’s Jennifer Jackson. The signatories commit to hiring at least 5% of their student workforce from the Black community and ensuring that 3.5% of board and executive positions are held by Black people by 2025.

Hall’s advice to racialized professionals: “If you’re stuck in [a] position for a sustained period of time and you’re an ambitious person, leave. Look at other companies that have a better track record in promoting racial diversity, even if you have to get less money and work your way up, because at least they’ll give you an opportunity.”

Michael Lee-Chin

Founder of Portland Holdings

In the late 1970s, Michael Lee-Chin drove 120 kilometres every day to his job in Tillsonburg, a small town in southern Ontario whose sweltering tobacco fields were immortalized in an eponymous song by Stompin’ Tom Connors. He had received only three job offers after returning to Canada, where he studied civil engineering at McMaster University, from an engineering job in Jamaica, where he was born and raised. The offers were all outside his intended field: long-haul truck driver, soap salesman and financial advisor. It was accepting the third that brought him to Tillsonburg and the world of finance.

As an advisor, Lee-Chin would spend his days cold-calling potential clients. If lucky, he was invited to their homes. “I was so excited that someone would really say yes to me and give me the opportunity to come and present,” he says. “I would say to myself while in the middle of the presentation at the kitchen table, ‘What’s the highest value I can give this family here tonight?’ And the answer kept coming back to me: make them wealthy.”

This led to another question: how?

He devised a formula for wealth creation: all wealthy people own a few high-quality businesses in long-term growth industries they deeply understand. They spend money prudently and view wealth through a long-term, intergenerational lens. Applying the formula to himself, he snapped up financial-services firms and ballooned their assets under management. The CEO of Portland Holdings and chair of the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica now has a personal net worth pegged at $1.5 billion. The philanthropist’s donations also helped found the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management’s Michael Lee-Chin Family Institute for Corporate Citizenship.

Lee-Chin notes that despite his impressive career, which includes being one of the few Canadians on the Forbes billionaire list, he’s never been invited to sit on a corporate board. “I can’t attribute it to anything other than that I must be less attractive than the worst board member in all the Canadian companies,” he jokes.

His approach to racism during his early career was shaped by a young man’s naiveté. Growing up in Jamaica to Black and Chinese-Jamaican parents, Lee-Chin says he never experienced racism and entered Canada colour-blind. “Had I been overthinking [colour] right out of the door I would have said to myself, ‘There’s no way I, as a Black man, should go and cold call in rural Ontario, where whenever they see Black people, they’re picking tobacco, not giving financial advice.’”

When asked how to fight systemic racism, Lee-Chin cited Newton’s law of inertia: an object will remain at rest unless an external force pushes it into motion. Similarly, he says, corporate Canada will remain complacent unless outsiders – be they consumers, activist investors or policy-makers – force it to change.

Tracy Miller

Senior vice-president of CP Rail

Long before Tracy Miller became a senior vice-president at CP Rail, he studied mathematics at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was scouted by a Chicago rail company.

Miller says his “lifestyle growing up as a young Black man [in Tennessee] and all the things that you deal with, mixed with this mathematical, analytical way of thinking,” readied him for a 25-year career in the sector. He says understanding the challenges of being one of the few Black executives in corporate America, and now corporate Canada, requires focusing on the words “one of the few.”

“You worry about a lot of different variables that come into play when there’s no one else around that’s like you. You feel like you have to be stronger than normal and at least twice as good sometimes to get some of the recognition that you deserve,” he says, echoing Jennifer Jackson’s sentiment.

In April 2019, Miller filed a suit against a former employer, alleging that racial discrimination had led to his being passed over for promotions five times since 2015, despite his excellent employee record and his reputation among his peers. He left to join CP as VP of corporate risk in March 2019.

Miller, like Hall, advises emerging Black leaders to find inclusive companies that value their talent: “Remain hopeful. Be persistent and be realistic.”

He adds, “I think there are a lot of young Black leaders who would excel if they were given an opportunity.”

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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, either, because we believe a course in strategy should be all about responsible strategy and it should be all about total shared values,” she says. “We teach all these different things that we believe should just be the standard.”

Climbing from fifth place on last year’s Better World MBA ranking, Griffith Business School scored higher on every key measure: content, research publications and citations, as well as gender and racial diversity. The school collaborates with all 16 research centres at Griffith University and has responsibility for half of them.

Other schools that did well in the ranking also enriched their course content, research and hiring practices consistent with the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

“We have made a conscious decision that we believe every MBA should be
a sustainable MBA.”

–Stephanie Schleimer, Griffith’s MBA director

For example, Duquesne University’s Palumbo-Donahue School of Business jumped to fourth spot this year from 28th in 2019, partly by adding sustainability to more core courses and recording growth in faculty publications and citations. The school offers a full-time MBA in Sustainable Business Practices program alongside a more conventional MBA.

“I really see a deepening of the focus, and every year we are looking to make improvements to adjust the content to make it better and keep it fresh,” says Karen Russo Donovan, the school’s associate dean of graduate programs and executive education. Moreover, she notes, “we have consistently published cutting-edge research on the broad topics of sustainability, as defined by Corporate Knights, in top journals.”

One of Palumbo-Donahue’s widely cited researchers is Robert Sroufe, a professor of sustainability, operations and supply chain management, whose work on sustainable building renovation has informed the school’s multimillion-dollar renewal. “We have monitors and dashboards throughout the building [gathering data on energy conservation, air quality and other measures], and the students can utilize that information as a living lab for analytics and management,” Donovan says.

Research also explains a rise in the ranking for two Canadian schools: the University of Guelph’s Lang School of Business and Economics and Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management placed sixth and eight respectively, up from 18 and 37 respectively in 2019.

Over the past year, Lang added research chairs in the business of food, entrepreneurship and sports management, with others pending in leadership, finance and marketing. Sustainability is not in the chair titles, but sustainable food systems, social enterprise and gender equity are themes of the research agendas, says MBA graduate coordinator Rumina Dhalla.

Lang students send their own message, too, with 70% enrolled in sustainable commerce, one of three MBA program streams.

When the Rogers School cracked the Better World ranking two years ago, faculty took a closer look at where sustainability appears in curriculum and research. “We were already doing it, but we weren’t keeping track of it, and we weren’t writing it down,” says Donna Smith, graduate program director of the MBA program. “That is what led us to capture what we were doing and move it forward.”

This fall, the school introduced a revamped MBA based on “leading for performance and well-being” in diversity, technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, with students taught about ethical corporate governance, socially responsible decision-making and environmental stewardship.

Ozgur Turetken, associate dean of research, says the school has hired about 50 new research-oriented faculty members over the past five years, with sustainable management a possible focus for future hires.

Despite school efforts, student advocates demand deeper commitments.

Business schools “need to talk about things like the triple bottom line, stakeholder capitalism, impact investing and sustainability reporting,” says Gareth Gransaull, past president of Ivey Business School’s student-run Social Impact Club at Western University. “We also need to introduce and have honest conversations about issues that are more controversial,” he adds, citing tax reform, corporate ethics, anti-racism initiatives and “greenwashing.”

Other schools have updated curriculum. Last fall, HEC Montréal added mandatory content on sustainable development in undergraduate and MBA programs, a spokesperson says, adding that the school is now weighing the possibility of a voluntary commitment by professors to embed sustainable development and social responsibility in all courses.

A comprehensive approach has merit, says Melody Tim Yen, a master of science student in supply-chain management at HEC and the former president of Groupe HumaniTerre, an on-campus sustainability advocacy organization.

“It’s the difference between vertical and horizontal markets,” she says. “Sustainability should be a horizontal component found in each vertical [course topic].”

To find out how the top 40 schools ranked, click here.

Correction: An earlier version of this story listed the University of Guelph’s Lang School of Business and Economics and Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management in fifth and sixth place respectively. They ranked sixth and eighth.

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Ryerson’s Ted Rogers School of Management, which placed first, names sustainability as one of nine learning outcomes reported to the Ontario government.

“We can’t let our students graduate without understanding these [sustainability] principles and how their decision-making is important,” says Cynthia Holmes, associate dean of faculty and academic. The school recently hired 21 professors, adding to its diversity.

Earlier this year, it introduced a sustainability module to the flagship global management course. The school’s curriculum also includes an elective on managing sustainability internationally.

“We are trying to help the students understand that [sustainability] is the only way to maintain profit in the long-term,” says Michael Manjuris, Rogers program chair for global management studies.

At Guelph’s Lang School, in second place, undergraduate students take a mandatory module on ethics in their first-year business program. This fall, Lang introduced a minor in sustainable business for students from any discipline on campus.

Guelph’s MBA graduate coordinator Rumina Dhalla praises students for leadership in organizing conferences on sustainability practices and conducting award-winning research, in one case on reducing single-use plastics in the restaurant industry.

Business schools can only gain with a sustainability focus, she says. “I think the schools who haven’t figured [this] out will do so.”

So how do Canada’s bachelors of commerce rank?

As with our MBA ranking, schools are evaluated on five performance indicators (with weighting in brackets): core course integration of sustainability (30%), faculty research publications on sustainability topics per faculty in calendar year 2019 (30%), number of citations per faculty for those publications (20%), sustainability-focused research institutes and centres (10%), faculty gender diversity (5%) and faculty racial diversity (5%).

You can find the complete breakdown of how schools are scored here:

Better_World_Top 10 B Comms_2020_Full_Results

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“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 that eviscerated a once-vibrant community dependent on car manufacturing. His father was among thousands laid off. “The theme of economic prosperity really resonates with me, and today, when I look at Alberta and our energy sector, that really resonates with me again,” he says.

As director of NRC’s Materials for Clean Fuels Challenge program, with a budget of $57 million over seven years, De Luna works with research scientists and the oil, gas and petrochemicals industry to identify promising technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. After an exploratory phase ends in 2021, the program will select the most promising candidates that, by 2026, could leave the lab for adoption by energy companies and private investors.

A co-founder of a venture to convert carbon dioxide into ethylene, De Luna likens his NRC role to a venture capitalist who backs promising ideas that generate returns in several years. In his case, he says, he looks for ideas with global impact. “My return on investment is not necessarily a monetary return. It is the potential for greenhouse-gas-emission reduction.”

Jesse Popp
Indigenous Environmental Stewardship Chair, University of Guelph

Wildlife ecologist Jesse Popp likes to see the whole picture in her research.
A member of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory in northern Ontario, she blends Western and Indigenous perspectives into her investigations of declining species and fluctuating wildlife populations.

“All my research takes this ‘two-eyed seeing’ approach to weaving together Indigenous and Western ways of knowing,” says Popp, who in September 2020 became the first Chair in Indigenous Environmental Stewardship at the University of Guelph. “Both are complementary to one another, and you get a better understanding of the world.”

One project is a study of declining moose populations across North America and several regions of Ontario. She applies Western scientific methods while gathering insights from Indigenous Elders and knowledge holders on changing land use and environmental conditions.

“Moose are a culturally important species to many First Nations,” Popp says. “We are basically bringing together Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to try and understand why the moose populations are declining and how that is impacting the environment and the communities that rely on moose.”

An emerging scholar, Popp previously held a Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in Indigenous Environmental Science at Mount Allison University and is a current recipient of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grant (2018–2023) to study the influence of natural and man-made pollutants on wildlife diversity and populations.

Early in her career, Popp questioned the exclusion of Indigenous perspectives in Western scientific research. That led her to develop Laurentian University’s first course in biology with Indigenous perspectives and history to create a whole picture of the discipline.

Her commitment to “two-eyed” research has only deepened, adding to her perspective on sustainability.
“If we respect our [interpersonal] relations, if we are responsible and if we are reciprocal, we can in turn live sustainably with the earth.” If so, she adds, “sustainability will come naturally.”

Simon Pek
Assistant professor, University of Victoria Gustavson School of Business

Democracy is under siege but count Simon Pek at the University of Victoria as “cautiously optimistic” about the potential to invigorate democratically run organizations.

In that cause, he wears many hats. An assistant professor of sustainability and organization theory at the university’s Gustavson School of Business since 2017, the 33-year-old won the inaugural UVic President’s Chair, the university’s highest academic honour, for contributions to teaching, research and the wider community. He is also co-chair of Gustavson’s Carbon Neutrality Plus committee to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and is a co-founder and board member of Democracy in Practice, a non-profit that promotes leadership capacity-building.

One of his research interests is the role of democracy in unions, worker-owned firms and cooperatives. Though democratic, these organizations too often wind up with entrenched leadership, leaving little room for new, diverse voices. “They have the same paralysis and problems as many societal governments,” he says.

One remedy, he says, is a democratic lottery to recruit new leaders from a pool of interested individuals. The result is a randomly selected group whose members collaborate on decision-making. “It’s less top-down and more horizontal,” Pek says, and enables added input from women and minorities.

His interest in the gig economy has prompted an examination of alternatives to new business platforms like ride-sharing Uber. “That [model] comes with enormous consequences for workers and communities in particular,” he says. An alternative is a worker-run cooperative whose members decide on practices and profit-sharing.

“I want to broaden what we think of as organizations,” Pek says. “Tons of organizations, not just those for profit, can play a massive role in positively addressing the SDGs.”

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