That was the public’s introduction to Extinction Rebellion (XR), a direct-action group inspired by 100 British academics and scientists who publicly expressed concerns about the environmental crisis and their disgust with society’s failure to confront it. XR demands that the U.K. government tell the truth about climate and reduce carbon emissions to net-zero by 2025.

Traffic stopped. Tempers flared. Hundreds were arrested. While most of XR’s demands weren’t met, the protests did succeed in pressuring the U.K. into becoming the first country to declare a national climate emergency. It also succeeded in spawning a global movement, including Extinction Rebellion Canada, which major blockaded bridges across Canada in late 2019 (and traffic in Vancouver just last week).

Now Extinction Rebellion is pushing a more specific form of protest: financial disobedience. Its “Money Rebellion” targets banks and investors that fund fossil-fuel companies. “Our political economy is hardwired to resist the change needed,” XR’s latest manifesto declares. “It can only continue to grow beyond planetary limits, deepen inequality and drive extinction. It is going to collapse and will take us down with it.”

To save the world, XR is promoting debt and tax strikes, in which supporters hold back a small portion of their debt and tax payments (even just £5) and send those sums instead to groups fighting for climate relief.

Target number one is Barclays, which XR calls “the worst European bank” for funding fossil fuels and industrial animal agriculture.

Do debt strikes work? XR cites past successes such as Gandhi’s resistance to India’s Salt Tax and the 1990 U.K. poll-tax protests (which resulted in the withdrawal of an unpopular head tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, and her resignation as party leader).

XR admits “debt rebels” can face legal jeopardy, but it assures timid rebels that “any financial disobedience will be conditional on the participation of thousands of fellow rebels, creating safer conditions for taking action.” XR rebels can also access a legal briefing kit.

A version of this story appeared in the Winter Issue of Corporate Knights magazine.

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SCP was founded by tech entrepreneur Bill Young, who made two fortunes in the 1990s and has spent 20 years giving away money to boost the prosperity of people who face employment barriers. SCP has gone through three phases: investing directly in social enterprises, developing innovative social-finance tools, and promoting innovative employee-training programs. Now Young and his team are focusing on a new solution: enhancing workers’ capital, rather than income, to increase prosperity and their resilience to economic shocks (say, the next pandemic).

How do people accumulate wealth? Usually through financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. After exploring various paths, SCP concluded that putting more shares into employees’ hands solves multiple problems:
• it helps workers build long-term wealth;
• it avoids the risks of new, inexperienced leadership after the founders or owners sell; and
• it bypasses the nefarious private-equity investors, who snap up companies in transition, looking for fast paybacks through mergers, layoffs and asset sales rather than by stewarding ongoing growth.

In addition, says SCP partner Jon Shell, worker-owned companies fare better than conventional businesses. In the U.S., where legislation encourages companies to borrow money to transfer shares at no cost to their employees over time, research indicates these firms grow faster, achieve higher profits and pay employees more.

The U.S., says Shell, now has about 6,400 employee-owned companies, with 14 million employees who share – wait for it – US$1.4 trillion in wealth. Canada, sadly, has only a handful of such companies – because our employee-stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) are mainly designed to sell (not give away) shares. And those shares go mainly to an elite group of affluent executives.

Moreover, when SCP investigated the U.S. landscape, it saw an untapped opportunity – to encourage huge pension funds to invest in ESOP companies. (Their loans compensate owners for giving up equity and are repaid over time from the proceeds of the business.)

SCP is now taking a two-pronged approach to encouraging employee ownership. First, it’s encouraging Canadian pension funds – many of which are looking for more opportunities for impact investing – to start lending to American ESOP companies. “If we can demonstrate how pension money can be used to support employee ownership while generating an attractive return,” he says, “we think we can move billions of dollars into the sector, resulting in billions more in employee wealth.”

Second, SCP has launched a campaign to bring more robust ESOP legislation to Canada, to give lower-income employees a better chance to build wealth. Shell says SCP is embarking on a lobbying campaign to get Canada to adopt the American “employee ownership trust” model, as the U.K. did in 2014. Since then, he says, employee ownership in the U.K. has grown 150%.

After years of opposing wealth concentration, Shell believes SCP has finally found a winning strategy. “It often seems we’ve been fighting an almost impossible battle. But for the first time it feels like we have a tank, not just a pistol.”

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1. It (sort of) already exists. Greta Thunberg and other global climate-strike activists might not think of themselves as populists, but they are part of a bottom-up movement that has rapidly sprung to international prominence, not least because it represents the views of people who feel unrepresented by mainstream politics. Significantly, groups such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion remain active despite the pandemic.

2. There’s already a long-standing progressive strand to populist thinking. True, the intellectual influence of this variant of populism probably peaked in France in the 1960s, but the Arab Spring was a reminder, albeit a short-lived one, of the emancipatory and transformative potential of mass movements. Given the existential stakes and the lack of credible centrist alternatives, populist uprisings could be an idea whose time has come. The challenge is to make progressive populist policies popular, well-informed, constructive and even healing. U.S. President Joe Biden’s appointment of John Kerry as “climate envoy” suggests that the message is getting through.

3. The times suit populists. There’s no in-principle reason why populist leaders and supporters should all be reactionary racists or rabid nationalists. On the contrary, contemporary forms of mass media and communication mean that new ideas and patterns of political and social mobilization are potentially easier to organize across national borders. Recognition of our common humanity and problems is something enlightened populists can highlight, especially if it includes those who feel left behind by “globalization.”

4. The planet needs progressive forms of populist participation if it is to be “saved.” In reality, the planet can carry on without us, of course. But if we are to survive in a vaguely civilized condition, we have to act – or compel our existing leaders to act – immediately. Only widespread, bottom-up pressure looks capable of encouraging the current generation of leaders – who generally seem either incapable or unwilling – to face environmental reality.

5. Populist participation could be a good thing. Sure, populism’s got a bad name and a discouraging historical track record, and Trump’s MAGA crowd doesn’t inspire confidence, but what’s the alternative? Plainly, democratic participation is not transformative enough on its own, even when it actually works and slightly more enlightened leaders get voted in. Biden could hardly be worse than his predecessor, but powerful feet need to be held to the fire by popular pressure. There’s also a demographic imperative that can be adequately addressed only if the growing political activism of young people is taken seriously and actually influences policy.

If you teach young people for a living, as I do, you’re obliged to try to envisage alternatives to the sort of business-as-usual that has got us to where we are: on the brink of civilizational collapse. Could progressive populism actually be the answer?

The post Could “environmental populism” be the answer to the climate crisis? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In 2010, Korteweg opened The Vegetarian Butcher (TVB), a single storefront in the Dutch capital of The Hague, where he says the only thing being slaughtered was prejudice. Since then, his veggie bratwurst, no-chicken chunks, meatless burgers and fish-free eel pies have spread across Europe, winning numerous best-food awards. TVB even finished third in a Dutch newspaper contest to find the “Golden Meatball,” despite being the only veggie company in the competition.

But Korteweg’s biggest win came in 2018, when his fast-growing company was acquired by U.K. food giant Unilever. It’s now the key brand – in partnership with Knorr, Hellman’s mayonnaise and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream – that Unilever is counting on to lead its new push into veggie products. In November, Unilever unveiled a plan to boost its sales of plant-based foods over the next few years to €1 billion a year – a fivefold increase. It’s part of the company’s Future Foods initiative, to provide consumers with healthier foods while also reducing their environmental impact.

Hanneke Faber, president of Unilever’s foods division, said her company has “a critical role to play in helping to transform the global food system. It’s not up to us to decide for people what they want to eat, but it is up to us to make healthier and plant-based options accessible to all.”

Unilever’s optimism is well placed. Research from U.K. investment bank Barclays last year forecast that the value of the global plant-based food and drink market could soar by more than 1,000% over the next 10 years. It also found that 40% of consumers are willing to pay premiums of up to 50% for more “natural” foods.

The market for veggie vittles goes far beyond vegans and vegetarians. According to Barclays, 92% of plant-based meals in the U.K. are consumed by “flexitarians,” semi-vegetarians who eat meat on occasion.

Still, food producers have to get their act together. “Alternative meat producers have plenty to do to make their products mainstream,” Barclays noted. “This should include research and development to improve nutrition and taste while keeping prices competitive, and a marketing campaign that emphasizes the health, animal welfare and environmental benefits.” If these issues are addressed, the researchers say, “these substitutes may capture a significant share of the market from traditional meat products.”

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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With oil companies and conservatives foot-dragging on climate change, Rockefeller’s descendants have come together to prod science forward once again. In a fall opinion piece in The New York Times, Daniel Growald, Peter Gill Case and Valerie Rockefeller – three of John D.’s great-great-grandchildren – pushed for banks to stop lending to the fossil-fuel sector. Calling the warming climate a “major risk” to the American economy, they urged financial leaders to “embrace innovation and move beyond the profits of fossil fuels to develop banking models that will excel in a zero-carbon world.”

The cousins pointed to Rainforest Action Network’s Banking on Climate Change report that found that since 2016 – when the writing was certainly on the wall for oil companies – 35 global banks have funnelled US$2.7 trillion into fossil-fuel projects. That trajectory, the writers say, “will guarantee a world with runaway climate disruption.”

The biggest lender on that list, at US$269 billion from 2016 through 2019, was JPMorgan Chase.

Also on the list of complicit banks were Canada’s Big Five: RBC, at US$141 billion; TD, at US$103 billion; Scotiabank, at US$98 billion; BMO, at US$82 billion; and CIBC, at US$58 billion.

The cousins were particularly upset that JPMorgan Chase had just released an announcement claiming to align with the Paris climate accord. But America’s largest bank offered no details on the proposed carbon-emission targets for its loan portfolio, nor any plans to curtail lending to the fossil industry – which the Rockefellers consider the best leverage for change.

So the family formed a new lobbying group, BankFWD. Its goal: to mobilize influential banking clients to pressure their banks to embrace the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C. Short of aggressive government action, they say, limiting access to financing is the best way to force resource companies to embrace greener solutions.

Meanwhile, oil and gas and coal are also getting pummelled on the investment side. In the first 10 months of 2020, the energy sector of the S&P 500 index plunged 52.5%. That wasn’t just the worst performance on Wall Street last year: “It was by far the worst of any sector in history,” noted Jason Goepfert of Minnesota-based Sundial Capital Research. “It exceeds the relative losses in tech after the internet bubble burst and devastation in financials following the [2008] financial crisis.”

In November, the energy index made up much of that lost ground by rising 30%, based on investors’ growing faith in the upcoming COVID-19 vaccines. Even so, the energy sector now accounts for less than 3% of the overall value of the S&P 500, versus 12% a decade ago.

A version of this brief appears in the upcoming Winter Issue of Corporate Knights magazine.

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

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Here’s my whistle-stop tour: I started a charity called Red Nose Day 30 years ago that has so far raised about US$1.5 billion for children in need. In 2005, I worked on the Make Poverty History campaign and the Live 8 concerts, trying to encourage the G7 nations to give billions more in aid and to cancel debt. But when the UN Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015, one question haunted me: where are the trillions going to come from to make these goals happen?

Then one day someone told me that the pension pot of the U.K. alone is £3.1 trillion – and that money could be fuelling all the best, most innovative, sustainable businesses (worldwide pensions have more than US$47 trillion). It suddenly became clear that to fix our carbon footprint – and create good jobs and fight for gender equality – we should all be paying attention to our financial footprint. It’s excellent to recycle more and give up meat on Mondays, but the most powerful weapon in our armoury for change is what our money is doing. Research shows that most people hardly know where their pensions are invested, but when they do find out, 70% would prefer that they be invested sustainably. Because after all, there’s no point inheriting a pension in a world on fire.

It’s been a gripping year. There were all sorts of doubts in my mind when we started: Was this a case of money versus morals, value versus values? Would the pension companies fight it like crazy? Would the U.K. government be onside? But it seems as though this is a real moment in history, and the people who control our pensions, pushed by the public, could just turn out to be necessary heroes of the moment. Returns on ESG-aligned pensions (measured against environmental, social and governance criteria) have been thriving, the British government wants pension funds to report seriously on their sustainability, and, most important of all, there’s a real consumer revolution happening.

I still believe strongly in charity and government aid, but the public, especially young people, are asking more and more, “What can I actually do in my own life to make a change?” They are watching where their food comes from, if their clothes are produced with principle, how they travel. But I believe ensuring that our pensions fund renewable energy, affordable housing, vaccine research and all the thousands of businesses that contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals is the single most powerful personal action.

The time for hesitation is through – everyone with a pension should check that it’s not doing the exact opposite of what they are working for in the rest of their lives. My friend Bronwyn King, a cancer doctor in Australia, found out that three of her top six pension investments were in tobacco companies. Her pension had contributed to more deaths than she’d saved. She decided to found Tobacco Free Portfolios.

It’s sometimes complicated to shift a pension, but we shouldn’t be accidental investors in an unsustainable future when every day our pensions could be moving the world toward achieving the SDGs and the Paris Agreement’s climate goals.

That’s why we believe it’s time for everybody, every company, every pension holder, to Make Our Money Matter.

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About a decade ago, Lynn Mueller, then in his mid-50s, had just retired from a run leading a geothermal firm. As he was casting about for his next act, Mueller noticed that his annual water bill had soared to more than $1,000 – a fact of domestic life he attributed to the presence of two teenagers. “Being a cheapskate,” he recalls with a chuckle, “I wanted to figure out how to get that money back.”

Leaning in, Mueller realized those dollars were literally flowing down the drain, in the form of hot water from showers, meaning, he knew, that the natural-gas-generated energy used to run the water heater was also going to waste.

The Vancouver entrepreneur didn’t invent drain-water heat exchangers. But he has spent the last several years engineering a more efficient version of the technology, which he’s now selling through Sharc Energy Systems, a publicly traded company he founded that designs “wastewater heat recovery systems” that use heat pumps to capture and recycle thermal energy from drains and sewer lines.

The firm began commercializing its technology about five years ago. Sharc has won customers in Washington, D.C., Seattle and Vancouver, which has fostered a thriving green-buildings sector with demanding energy codes and projects such as the False Creek Neighbourhood Energy Utility, a City of Vancouver venture that reuses waste energy from sewer mains to heat about 5.7 million square feet of residential, institutional and commercial space downtown. Sharc developed the waste-water filtration systems that have been used in the facility since 2016.

Mueller says his company has a few high-profile advocates in its corner: former B.C. premier Mike Harcourt sits on the board, while the potential of waste-water energy recovery has been talked up to municipalities by former Toronto mayor David Miller, a prominent green building advocate through the C40 network of megacities committed to climate action.

In his new book, Solved: How the World’s Great Cities are Fixing the Climate Crisis, Miller describes waste-water heat recovery as an emerging technology that is not only relatively simple, but uses heat sources “that have not been traditionally thought of as a resource which exists in all buildings, and are renewable.”

“There’s massive potential with these technologies,” he said in a recent interview.

In the case of New York City – where Sharc has a two-year-old partnership with Highmark, an HVAC and energy-efficiency contractor, and utility giant Consolidated Edison – there are 100,000 buildings, and half of them need energy retrofits.

New York figures in Miller’s book as one example of how big cities can drive energy savings and reduce the carbon used by buildings, estimated to be responsible for about 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions. The city has, since 2009, required certain building owners – mainly large commercial landlords – to benchmark and publicly disclose their energy- and water-efficiency levels.

Subsequent changes to the policy have widened the net of buildings required to comply and added a standardized scoring system. Technologies like Sharc and other upgrades to mechanical systems, like high-efficiency HVAC, play a large role for property managers who have to hit those targets. Mayor Bill de Blasio last year pushed through an even more aggressive timetable for building owners to slash emissions.

“The case for benchmarking is quite simple,” Miller says. “Requiring building owners to publicly state the energy efficiency of their buildings will cause the market to change its behaviour. Once prospective tenants, who are responsible for paying the cost of heating and cooling, know how inefficient the building is, the owners [will] adapt in order to accommodate the desires of the tenants.”

The former Ontario Liberal government introduced mandatory benchmarking for large buildings in 2017, and a somewhat watered-down version remains in effect. The City of Edmonton three years ago introduced voluntary benchmarking, with incentives for owners to comply, according to Abhishek Chakraborti, senior environmental project manager. The number of participating buildings has risen from 99 to 278. Chakraborti says that the city is looking at making the program mandatory.

You need to mandate energy efficiency. It’s such an obvious thing, because  it pays for itself.”

– David Miller

Miller says that required benchmarking and disclosure is the only way to confront the dilemma of “split incentives” – that is, that for the developers and owners of buildings, there’s often no financial upside to energy-efficiency improvements because it’s the tenants or condo investors who bear the cost.

“There is a structural market failure, [so] you need to mandate energy efficiency. And it’s such an obvious thing, because it pays for itself. It’s the right thing to do. It creates jobs, and you end up with a better building, better air quality, and probably better conditions for people to work in.”

In Solved, Miller discusses an even more ambitious city-focused green building program: Tokyo’s cap-and-trade system, which has been in effect since 2010 and applies to every building. The municipality proscribes emission reductions but also offers “a solution for buildings that are so difficult to improve that they cannot meet the targets: trading carbon credits.” Those owners that can’t boost efficiency must buy credits from buildings that have exceeded theirs. According to Miller, Tokyo buildings subject to the cap-and-trade program have cut their emissions by 27% compared to 2009 levels.

Overall, Miller adds, enforceable building-related energy-efficiency goals – in the form of building codes, benchmarks or other mechanisms – are driving investment in sustainable building materials, components and technologies. Indeed, B.C., with its increasingly stringent building codes, has become a magnet for sustainability entrepreneurs like Lynn Mueller, who can not only see the writing on – and in – the walls, but understand how to profit from it.

As he says of waste-water heat recovery, “The billions of dollars that goes down the drain around the world is worth recovering. It’s not rocket science.”

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Thankfully, others – including some in the business community – have been moving forcefully in the opposite direction. One notable example is Storebrand, Norway’s largest private fund manager, which last August became the first sizable investor to divest from businesses that continue to lobby against tougher environmental rules.

“Climate change is one of the greatest risks facing humanity, and lobbying activities which undermine action to solve this crisis are simply unacceptable,” said Jan Erik Saugestad, Storebrand’s CEO. InfluenceMap, a U.K.-based think tank, estimated in March 2019 that the world’s five largest oil and gas companies measured by market value – BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Total – spend almost US$200 million a year on efforts to delay, control or block policies designed to tackle climate change.

“The Exxons and Chevrons of the world are holding us back,” Saugestad noted, referring to two of the five companies whose shares Storebrand has dumped. The other three are Anglo-Australian miner Rio Tinto, German chemicals manufacturer BASF and Southern Co., an Atlanta-based electric utility.

Storebrand, which manages more than US$90 billion in assets, has also sold its stakes in another 22 companies – mostly power utilities, chemical companies and oil producers – that fall short of a tougher slate of climate policies that it recently adopted. Among the new criteria is a commitment not to invest in companies that derive more than 5% of their revenues from coal or oil sands.

Storebrand’s moves reflect mounting pressure on institutional investors to take a stand on climate change. A majority of Chevron shareholders supported a resolution at the company’s 2020 annual meeting that sets tougher disclosure standards on climate-related lobbying activities. Proxy Insight, which tracks corporate governance issues, reports that shareholder support for climate-lobbying resolutions averaged 47.2% last year, more than double the 21.4% recorded in 2019.

Saugestad put it well: “Investors need to be responsible and proactive in accelerating the green transition. We are not passive actors awaiting the pending systemic harm that climate change will unleash.”

Zero:

There is much to admire about the gig-economy companies that have woven themselves into our everyday lives over the past decade. Uber and Lyft have revolutionized urban transport. Instacart enables us to shop for groceries without ever leaving home, while DoorDash delivers tasty restaurant meals to our front doors, a special boon during the pandemic.

When it comes to labour practices however, these companies belong more in the 19th century than the 21st. Their drivers and personal shoppers work long hours for precious little reward. Because these workers are classified as independent contractors, they receive few if any of the normal workplace benefits, such as minimum wages, health or unemployment insurance, and parental leave.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, estimate that Uber and Lyft saved US$413 million in their state alone between 2014 and 2019 by not paying unemployment insurance premiums. More recently, the companies have been accused of violating a law passed by the state legislature last January that tightens the criteria for classifying workers as contractors.

None of that has stopped Uber and other app-based companies from fighting to preserve their workers-come-last business model. Indeed, they cranked up the pressure ahead of last November’s U.S. elections by pouring close to US$200 million into backing a California ballot initiative, known as Proposition 22, that would dilute the worker gains contained in last January’s law.

The companies contended that regulators should treat app-based businesses as technology platforms, not transport providers or food delivery services, because their workers have the flexibility to log into or out of the employer’s app at will. Uber warned that it would have little choice but to raise prices and limit services if Proposition 22 failed to pass.

Voters ended up approving the proposition by a 16-point margin. But that doesn’t make it fair on the workers.
Critics predict that Proposition 22 will reinforce the inequalities that have become a tinderbox of modern society, especially in the U.S. The UC Berkeley researchers concluded that, under the proposal, Uber and Lyft drivers would earn a mere US$5.64 an hour after factoring in down-time and expenses such as fuel and maintenance. Proposition 22 could also set a troubling precedent by encouraging deep-pocketed companies to take their cases directly to voters when they come up against laws they don’t like.

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For the last 25 years Hollyhock, a conference centre on Cortes’s sandy south shore, has been stirring up dissent, promoting social activism and talking cash flow through a movement called the Social Venture Institute (SVI). Founded by a trio of Greenpeace activists from the “Save the Whales” 1970s, Hollyhock began by offering weary urbanites programs in personal growth and the healing arts. In 1995, 30 entrepreneurs who had assembled to explore how business can heal the planet ended up founding what is now SVI. In the years since, Hollyhock’s lush gardens and cedar lodges have become a crucible for more than 3,000 practical altruists who believe the best way to achieve equity and social justice is to build your own change-making platforms.

Through annual events at Hollyhock and in Vancouver, Banff and San Francisco, SVI has developed robust networks of values-driven activists in sectors such as organic food, climate-change mitigation and sustainable tourism. Happy Planet – the Burnaby, B.C., producer of organic juices and smoothies now carried by most Canadian grocers – came out of the SVI community. So did Happy Planet’s co-founder, Gregor Robertson, an organic farmer who served three terms as Vancouver’s greenest mayor.

Caring communities are contagious, says SVI co-founder Joel Solomon: “SVI was a petri dish out of which a lot of good things grew.” SVI has spun off such prominent organizations as Canadian Business for Social Responsibility, which also turned 25 last year; Net Impact, a global non-profit that helps business students pursue social purpose in 435 universities; and MakeWay (formerly Tides Canada), a donor-driven foundation that changed its name last year to distance itself from the US-based Tides Foundation.

Why focus on entrepreneurs? Social ventures have the potential to become self-sustaining agents of change. Where most non-profits struggle for funding, and reform-minded governments may be blocked by stubborn lobbyists, progressive entrepreneurs fund themselves – and need no one’s permission to grow. As they build new business models in finance, food, health products, energy, workplace training and even the arts, they’re also building ecosystems of social innovation. Where 1960s activists railed against corporations, today’s social entrepreneur knows that power grows out of a solid business plan.

“Business and finance are close to neutral tools,” says Solomon. “The values and purpose we put into them is what matters.”

SVI events come with unusual ground rules. Solomon, a Vancouver impact investor who sat on Hollyhock’s board for 30 years, says SVI organizers personally select their attendees, ensuring that two-thirds come from for-profit businesses, one-third from not-for-profits. (They also throw in lawyers and accountants, because entrepreneurs can never have too many professionals on speed dial.) SVI also seeks a majority of women attendees.

“We’re trying to feminize business a bit,” says Solomon. “We want to get away from the macho ruthless business model to a more collaborative one.”

SVI sets another quota: half of attendees should be first-timers. “The do-good conspiracy,” as Solomon calls it, isn’t building a club; it’s seeding a movement. Before COVID-19 struck, SVI was planning to expand to Toronto, and maybe New York. Which is good news, because social entrepreneurship isn’t just a West Coast thing. And it’s hard, sometimes lonely work.

A 2016 survey by Mount Royal and Simon Fraser universities found social enterprises sprinkled across Canada, employing 31,000 people and generating revenues of $1.2 billion (the sector has grown significantly since then). Their average profit margin was a reasonable 4.8%. But two-thirds of the surveyed companies were more than 16 years old, so those findings don’t reflect the difficulty of launching a business or battling the status quo.

Enter SVI, whose events develop not only business savvy but resilience, empathy and connectedness. Because of COVID, SVI’s fall conference was held virtually. Gone were sunrise yoga and long walks in the rain, but the organizers orchestrated four days of highly engineered learning and mentorship for 230 attendees on Zoom. For those who couldn’t make it, here are six top takeaways from SVI 25 for anyone hoping to make change.

1. SVI 25 opened on a Tuesday evening with music and a review of the Hollyhock rules. The most important one turns out to be even more relevant in real life than at any conference: “Relationships first, business second.

2. In a session called True Confessions, Karina Birch of Rocky Mountain Soap Company spoke about growing her Canmore, Alberta, soap business into an international brand with 200 employees. Working with a chemist, she insisted that her soaps be 100% natural – using only “pronounceable” ingredients, with no chemicals or preservatives. When the chemist argued that 98% natural was good enough, Birch insisted on 100%. Even her business philosophy gets boiled into pronounceable steps: Trust your intuition. Go rogue. (“Everyone in the company has the ability to do something they don’t have approval for,” says Birch. “It doesn’t always work, but neither do the things I do.”) And finally, stay humble and keep learning. As her company grew, Birch took a course at Harvard to learn how to manage a complex organization. “I started as the soapmaker,” she says. “I had to earn the job of CEO.”

3. Unlearn your biases: Like many organizations, SVI is struggling to address systemic racism. In a frank session called Anti-Oppression, CEO Peter Wrinch shared Hollyhock’s diversity journey. “We were making strides, but to a limited form of inclusion,” he admitted. “We said, ‘Let’s invite more racialized people – but let’s not do anything to examine what the space feels like for those people.’” Similarly, Hollyhock had long welcomed the island’s Indigenous Klahoose community, shared job ads with them and gladly sold their art. But at heart, Wrinch said, “the relationship was all about us.” As part of what Wrinch calls “decolonizing work,” Hollyhock called on the Klahoose to actually listen to their goals. This year, a 14-day Klahoose expedition setting out to visit families in Washington State, 200 kilometres away, beached their canoes on Hollyhock’s shore. As Wrinch greeted the group, he wondered why he was welcoming Indigenous people to land on their own traditional territory: “We’re just at the beginning of our journey of unlearning.”

4. There’s no learning without reflection. An odd SVI habit is to pause a session to give the audience time to mull over what they’re learning. Compare that to most conferences, where people race from session to session and never get time to reflect. SVI makes time for thinking, because that’s the important part.

5. In a second True Confessions session, Adnan Durrani, CEO of Connecticut-based Saffron Road, spoke about the troubled launch of his Halal-certified food company. Durrani’s products debuted nationally at Whole Foods in 2010, just in time for Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and self-reflection. The retail chain welcomed Saffron Road with signs saying “Happy Ramadan,” but one Texas manager tore the signs down, saying Ramadan would not be celebrated in his store. Durrani’s response expertly blended composure and commercialism. Before going on CNN to discuss the incident, he negotiated to display his products on-screen – and then refused to criticize his client when the reporter asked, “Did Whole Foods do anything wrong?” Instead, Durrani focused on how new his product was, how helpful the retailer had been, and how the Texas incident was an anomaly. Whole Foods was delighted, and sales took off. Durrani urged SVI attendees to use “halal-jitsu” to turn problems into growth opportunities. “I know there’s a lot of darkness out there,” he said. “Instead of being a victim, be the driver of change.”

6. On Thursday evening, just before SVI’s virtual 25th anniversary party, attendees heard from one of the organization’s founders. Gary Hirshberg, chairman and “chief organic optimist” at Stonyfield Farm, one of the world’s leading organic yogurt producers, urged change agents to embrace the everyday challenges of business: cash flow, marketing, how to treat people, how to retain ownership. “This is where we make or break it,” he said. “The angel is in the details.”

Wearing a cap that said “Make Earth Cool Again,” Hirshberg said that for social entrepreneurs, the challenge is just beginning. “It’s no longer about slowing climate change, it’s about reversing it: taking carbon out of the air and putting it back into the soil.”

“Business,” said Hirshberg, “is the only force strong enough to move us in a different direction.”

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All of which has created the perfect petri dish for responsible robo-advisors. More millennials are looking to invest, and a surge of digital platforms are offering up automated, algorithm-driven investment services to help them do just that. Canada’s top robo-advisors say they’ve experienced double-digit growth since the start of the pandemic. Wealthsimple’s client base is up 24%. RBC’s Rajan Bansi called 2020 a “record year” for his bank’s InvestEase app – with RBC’s responsible portfolio a key driver of that growth.

But while environmentally and socially aligned investments are exploding around the world (constituting 40% of global investments), only a handful of Canadian robo-advisors offer “responsible” investing solutions.

If the hippies over at JPMorgan investment bank are right, Canadians are losing out: “Virtually all ESG index funds [those that assess environmental, social and governance factors] outperformed their conventional benchmarks because they were underweight in energy, the worst-performing sector so far this year.”

At this point, anyone who’s particular about aligning their wallet with specific values – like, say, zero waste or animal welfare – isn’t likely to find much comfort in the virtual hands of a robo-advisor. Good Investing’s Tim Nash explains: “Robo-advisors are elegant in their simplicity and offer responsible investors the best way to ‘set it and forget it.’ Unfortunately, their responsible portfolios are ‘one size fits all’ and won’t go far enough for some people.”

If that’s you, you’re better off going the DIY route so you can customize where your retirement savings go, based on your own unique priorities and values. In the meantime, here’s how three of Canada’s top robo-advisors with socially responsible investment (SRI) options stack up.

Wealthsimple

Arguably the hippest of the robo-advisors (just scroll through the lengthy list of influencers in its Instagram feed), Wealthsimple prominently promotes socially responsible investing as its top option for “investing on autopilot.”

Assets under management (AUM): $5 billion
Minimum investment: $0
Total annual fees: 0.62%

★ ★ World-changing impact: Wealthsimple has significantly beefed up screening on its SRI portfolios since our first robo ranking in 2019. It now boots out oil/gas/coal companies and other high-carbon emitters, along with weapons-makers and tobacco companies. It also screens out companies with few women on their boards. So it’s avoiding a lot of the worst companies, but to improve its score here, it needs to do lots more investing in sustainable solutions.

★ ★ Customization: Wealthsimple encourages you to “invest in your values,” but those values are limited to “halal” or the general “socially responsible” option.

★ ★ ★ ★ Transparency: Head to the help centre and you’ll find the full list of company names in its basket of stocks. Easy for the picky investor to peruse.

★ ★ How returns compare to business-as-usual: Its site used to have helpful graphs spelling out how SRI investments have fared compared to “traditional investors.” Today, graphs in the help centre will tell you that the balanced SRI portfolio has grown by a cumulative 34.5% (net of fees) since it was launched on March 24, 2016 (to November 30, 2020). But nothing about how it fared in relation to conventional portfolios.

★ ★ ★ Green cred: Since Wealthsimple stopped relying on external funds, you’ll no longer find the likes of Chevron and Imperial Oil in your portfolio – a relief for anyone concerned about the climate crisis. But zero-wasters aren’t going to dig that Keurig and Coca-Cola are top holdings, and animal lovers are bound to cringe at the 0.59% invested in Canada Goose.

RBC InvestEase

The only Big 5 bank with an SRI robo-advisor. RBC InvestEase’s “responsible investing” option promises to “help drive positive change by investing in companies aligned with your values.”

AUM: N/A
Minimum investment: $100
Total annual fees: 0.66%

★ World-changing impact: Negative screens are more social than environmental: no tobacco, controversial weapons, civilian firearms or companies involved in “very severe controversies” (Wells Fargo was recently booted out for its account fraud scandal). Beyond that, RBC says it chooses companies that “score most favourably in the assessment of environmental, social and governance risk factors,” but to boost this score it’ll need to really ramp up investments in sustainable solutions.

★ Customization: As with most robos, algorithms personalize to risk preference but not to values, other than choosing between “responsible” and, well, not.

★ ★ Transparency: If you dig into the FAQs, you’ll find a list of the ETFs (exchange-traded funds) RBC invests in. They now share the top 10 holdings of those ETFs, but you’ll have to rummage around on other websites to find the full list of companies that make up those ETFs.

★ How returns compare to business-as-usual: InvestEase “believe[s] companies that effectively manage ESG risks over the long-term could achieve superior financial results versus their less-effective peers,” but no evidence is provided. When contacted, RBC reps said that as of December 10, 2020, “the 100% equity portfolio outperformed its standard peer by approximately 100 bps.” Why not post that?

★ Green cred: InvestEase says its portfolios are invested in companies that score the highest on ESG factors. But its “iShares ESG Aware MSCI Canada ETF” banks on a number of Canadian oil, gas and pipeline companies, including Keystone-pusher TC Energy and Imperial Oil. To go fossil-free, skip the robo and ask RBC for its fossil-free ETFs.

Questwealth Portfolios

This popular robo comes courtesy of Questrade Wealth Management, Canada’s largest indie online brokerage firm. It’s had a socially responsible investing option since late 2018.

AUM: $20 billion (Questwealth Portfolios and Questrade)
Minimum investment: $1,000
Total annual fees: 0.38%

★ ★ World-changing impact: Of the bunch, Questwealth invests the most in cleantech solutions. However, there are no negative screens to filter out, say, weapons, tobacco or oil companies, so you will find all three in here. Over half (57%) of its small-holdings account is in a “low carbon” ETF whose holdings include Kinder Morgan, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

★ Customization: Besides adjusting for risk preference, SRI investors can opt for a small- or large-holdings account, but you can’t opt for fossil-free, for instance.

★ ★ Transparency: One improvement since our 2019 ranking: ETF names are now listed front and centre on the home page, but you’ll have to look elsewhere to discover which companies those ETFs are invested in.

★ ★ How returns compare to business-as-usual: Front-page graphs reveal that the SRI portfolios have returned anywhere from 12 to 22% since inception, but there’s no comparison to the broader market. Reps say that in the past year, the SRI portfolios have outperformed the standard portfolios. It would be helpful if this comparison was shared publicly.

★ ★ Green cred: While its SRI small-holdings account puts 27% into a solid cleantech fund, overall its portfolios include a number of fossil fuel and pipeline companies. The presence of Jantzi Social Index ETF only compounds the problem, with some questionable holdings like Imperial Oil (Canada’s Exxon subsidiary).

Correction: Wealthsimple’s world-changing score has been updated.

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