But what would Ottawa actually do differently? Details were scarce, and traditional business think tanks, dominated by global companies, tended to stay silent.

But one voice made itself heard. Just days after the release of Trump’s National Security Strategy, the Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) fired back with a layered plan for building a domestic technology industry that could free the country from foreign tech platforms and build Canadian prosperity.

Founded in 2015 by two energetic tech leaders – former BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie and venture capitalist John Ruffolo, then CEO of OMERS Ventures – the CCI provides a voice for more than 150 independent tech companies. Rather than ceding control of Canada’s digital infrastructure to foreign multinationals, CCI aims to build a community of more ambitious homegrown tech firms that put Canada first.

CCI’s letter urged the government to focus on new export markets and embedding value-added innovation into traditional exports such as resources, energy and food. Ottawa should convene industry advisory groups to help guide these new trade negotiations, the letter argued, and promote made-in-Canada tech platforms.

“Canada needs to decide whether we will be strategic participants or a vassal state to global tech giants,” CCI CEO Patrick Searle said in a statement. The new U.S. security strategy, he said, proves that in today’s markets, intellectual property, AI and quantum computing, and new defence technologies aren’t just important business breakthroughs, but “national security assets.”

With the United States adopting a winner-take-all manifesto, Searle says, “Canada needs to respond with urgency, clarity, and a domestic strategy built around sovereign capability.”

Rick Spence is the editor-at-large at Corporate Knights. He is based in Toronto.

The post Canada’s innovators have a plan for a more sovereign economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The party’s momentum has been building since the United Kingdom’s July 2024 general election, when voters elected four Green Party members of Parliament out of a total of 650, quadrupling the party’s number of representatives in the House of Commons while removing a handful of seats from the Labour and Conservative parties. 

Nearly two years later, the Greens are now averaging around 13.5% support nationally, with a notable gain in recent months, according to an aggregated Guardian tracker. In February, Green Party candidate and plumber Hannah Spencer won a by-election in Manchester’s Gorton and Denton constituency, an area that had been previously held by Labour for the past 90 years, bringing the party’s total number of MPs to five. 

What’s powering the surge? Experts say increasing political fragmentation is a key factor, with more voters looking for alternatives to Labour and the Conservatives, which have held the most seats in recent elections. Growing disillusionment with the governing Labour Party is another factor. Britain’s centre-left party is tanking with voters, many of whom feel it has failed to address the cost-of-living crisis or deliver on its promises. According to YouGov’s polling, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s personal favourability sat at 18% in January 2026. 

There’s a big space to the left of the Labour Party that’s been there for a few years. Polanski is tapping into that opportunity.

— Mitya Pearson, University of Warwick

While Starmer’s support stagnates, the Green Party’s Polanski, who is 43, is on an upward trajectory. He was elected party leader in fall 2025, beating two of the party’s MPs with a left-wing eco-populist platform and a direct communication style. Polanski has said the party needs to “connect with that anger and turn it to hope, turn it to possible solutions.” And his message and style have been resonating with an increasing number of voters who feel abandoned by the Labour Party. Since fall 2025, Green Party membership has almost tripled, from 68,500 to more than 200,000.  

“I finally feel seen by a politician and someone who is willing to not only defend but make my family’s lives better,” says Tinashe Warikandwa, a London resident who describes herself as a member of the queer community and the daughter of an immigrant and a disabled mother. She is one of the thousands of Brits who recently became Green Party members. “My great interest in Zack is his push to tax the rich,” Warikandwa says. “There is such a discomfort in the U.K., with the cost of everything and not much funding going into our communities. I like his angle of saying there’s more of us than the 1%, so he’s trying to bring us all together. He’s young and fresh and unfiltered.” 

Polanski’s message connects the dots between cost-of-living pressures, economic inequality and the climate crisis. He has also taken on issues that Labour and other parties have been reluctant to engage with, including the rights of Palestinian people to self-determination and trans rights.  

“There’s a big space to the left of the Labour Party that’s been there for a few years. Polanski is tapping into that opportunity,” says Mitya Pearson, assistant professor in the Politics of Climate Change MA program at the University of Warwick. “Although [the Greens] have always really emphasized the environment and climate change, they’ve been keen to point out that they’re not a single-issue party. So while climate change is part of [their platform], it’s not absolutely front and centre.”  

The rise of the Green Party and forward push on climate policies in the United Kingdom stands in contrast to what’s happening in Germany, Austria and other European countries, where far-right parties have been trying to dismantle support for climate policies by blaming them for cost-of-living challenges. Environmentalists and think tanks are raising alarm bells about what they’re calling a “greenlash” against the European Green Deal and other climate policies. 

Pearson believes that European voters are still supportive of progressive climate policies but that support for these issues has been superseded by affordability concerns. In both Europe and the United Kingdom, voters are sending the message that affordability and the climate are interconnected and must be addressed as such.   

Will Polanski and the Green Party be able to continue to build support in the United Kingdom by connecting those dots? Calls are growing for Starmer to resign, and Pearson says some expect the Labour Party to begin leaning more to the left to rebuild its base. If that happens, there may be more competition for the space the Greens have been moving into. Which could mean more debate about progressive issues, and more choice for voters. 

The post The U.K. Green Party’s having a moment  appeared first on Corporate Knights.

She was new to the issues herself, she said. But the long-time social worker kept at her new job doing outreach for Community Action Network, a local non-profit dedicated to serving under-resourced communities. She slowly started getting people in her neighbourhood to take part first in home energy assessments, then a city program to swap out appliances, make structural fixes and more.

“In the beginning it was kind of hard – a lot of people were reluctant. If someone is knocking on your door and telling you they can fix up your home for free, most people don’t believe that,” Steward says. But, she adds, “Once one person tried it out, they’d tell their neighbours, and others would jump on board.”

Now the neighbourhood, Bryant, is set to pilot a first-in-the-country program that officials hope will speed the city’s transition to renewables – and offer a new model for how local governments can control their energy future.

A tandem system

The idea is technical but has sparked enthusiasm across Bryant and Ann Arbor: a new city-created Sustainable Energy Utility, known colloquially as the SEU. Rather than replacing the privately owned utility that serves Ann Arbor, the plan is for this city agency to run in tandem, offering a supplemental service that residents can opt into.

If they do, they’ll stay connected to the regular grid but will be outfitted with solar panels, battery backup systems or other infrastructure, drawing on that power for their home use and opening up the prospect of selling any excess. The city, meanwhile, would pay for the installation and maintenance of these systems, which Ann Arbor would continue to own – a vision of energy generation and storage distributed across the city.

The plan begins in the coming months in Bryant, a 1970s-era community with about 260 homes, many of which are officially considered “energy burdened.” A quarter of residents spend more than a third of their incomes on utilities, in a neighbourhood that is one of Ann Arbor’s only areas of unsubsidized affordable housing, according to Derrick Miller, Community Action Network’s executive director.

The SEU is a major step in a years-long process to address Bryant’s energy affordability and sustainability concerns – and then expand the approach across the city.

“When we started having a conversation about how to decarbonize the neighbourhood about four years ago, it felt outlandish. Now, it doesn’t feel like anyone can stop us,” Miller says.

A welcome solution

The appeal of the SEU became clear in November 2024, when a ballot measure on the proposal was approved by nearly 80% of Ann Arbor voters. A little over a year later, city officials are ready to implement the vision, SEU executive director Shoshannah Lenski says.

In late February, the city announced that it was accepting expressions of interest from residents and businesses to take part, accompanied by a flurry of community meetings, animated videos and ads in local theatre playbills.

Customers who opt in will get two utility bills – one for the power supplied by these new city-owned clean-energy systems and one for any power they’re still drawing from the regular grid – which Lenski and her colleagues say will add up to less than they currently pay.

“Just like customers don’t own a power plant, the city owns and finances the system upfront, and they pay for that electricity through a monthly bill,” Lenski says. She notes that the model could prove particularly helpful for renters, who are often left out of green energy incentives.  Signing up large multifamily buildings will be important to quickly expand the SEU’s size, she says.

In addition to installing clean-energy systems at participants’ homes, the SEU could build its own microgrids, something that would set it apart from other municipal clean-energy programs. For instance, the agency could install solar panels on a school to supply power when students and teachers are in the building, and that power could go to other SEU customers when classes are out.

Backers say the strategy allows Ann Arbor to build out its green energy system with lower financial risk – and lower potential for political or industry pushback.

“When coupled with DTE’s planned investments in clean energy, these voluntary, fee-based programs help accelerate economy-wide decarbonization while maintaining reliability and affordability,” Ryan Lowry, a spokesperson for DTE Energy, which currently supplies energy to the city, says in an email.

It might seem surprising that DTE, Michigan’s largest electric utility, is supportive of the SEU. But industry experts note that many investor-owned utilities are struggling under the unprecedented new demands for power. Having a local government try to help manage power needs could be seen as an asset, they suggest – though DTE will have no formal role in the SEU.

So far, more than 1,500 people across Ann Arbor have indicated that they want to sign up. The SEU plans to serve around 100 to 150 customers in Bryant this year, expand out to reach 1,000 next year, and then grow by several thousand annually after that.

Embracing ambition

The approach answers a question prompted when Ann Arbor adopted an ambitious climate plan in 2020.

That framework included an electrical grid powered completely by renewable energy within a decade, but a city analysis in 2023 warned it was likely to miss that goal by more than 40%. To reach it, the city would need to push DTE to accelerate its renewable-energy buildout, or lean on state officials to do so – or detach from DTE entirely and create a separate city-owned utility, an idea that does have some support in Ann Arbor.

But from the city’s perspective, these options seemed too risky or uncertain, Lenski says – until officials realized that the Michigan constitution allows municipalities to create and run their own utility, even if there’s another present. “That’s where the idea of the SEU was born,” she says.

When University of Michigan researchers compared the four options, they found that the SEU model had the greatest potential to lower energy prices and emissions, boost reliability and help low-income communities.

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“Overall, it came down to having some benefits of local control without some of the costs,” says Mike Shriberg, a professor who led the research, noting a similar model should be possible in every state.

Still, some worry the strategy does not go far enough. Advocates who want the city to break with DTE and replace its services with a utility fully owned by Ann Arbor are seeking a November ballot measure to set that process in motion. (Organizers are currently collecting signatures.)

Brian Geiringer, executive director of the advocacy group Ann Arbor for Public Power, says the SEU plan still leaves too much responsibility for the city’s energy transition with DTE. But if voters do approve creating a fully public utility, he says, it would not mean an end to the SEU: the two approaches could work together, with the SEU focused on generation within Ann Arbor, and a publicly owned utility able to make its own decisions on purchasing power.

“If you draw a circle around Ann Arbor, the SEU is doing stuff inside the circle,” Geiringer says. “And we’re interested in having the city control what comes in from outside of the circle.”

Cities take control

Like Ann Arbor, hundreds of cities are working to implement climate goals – and running into similar gaps between ambition and practicality, especially when it comes to control over energy sources.

“Cities have set these goals, and the utilities aren’t obligated to follow those,” says Matthew Popkin, manager for U.S. cities and communities at RMI, an energy think tank. “So Ann Arbor’s SEU is an example of cities taking more control of their future without dismantling or acquiring existing utility systems,” he says. “That’s a really interesting model.”

Other models also exist. In Washington, D.C., for instance, a program called the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility has been operating for 15 years, overseeing the city’s efforts to help residents use less energy. The initiative is far narrower than the Ann Arbor vision, functioning not as a utility but rather as an organization contracted by the city to boost energy efficiency and increase access to clean energy through subsidies and rebates.

The program is a central part of the city’s goals to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, managing director Benjamin Burdick says, and has helped cut some 10 million metric tons of emissions while saving residents more than US$2 billion from reduced energy use. Nationally, “the conversation that we’re hearing is around how do you continue to talk about climate with affordability,” he says. “Programs like the D.C. SEU are going to continue to be the way that we double down.”

The work in Ann Arbor is now receiving its own attention across the country. “What caught my eye about Ann Arbor’s efforts were the references to citizen involvement and co-investment in their own grid,” says Jim Gilbert, a retired medical product designer in Boulder, Colorado, who is now helping the city assess the Ann Arbor model.

Boulder has dealt with recent power outages due to worsening climate impacts and aging infrastructure, and Gilbert says an SEU could offer a way forward.

Back in Ann Arbor, as the city prepares to launch the initial pilot of its SEU, the plan is to reach half of the Bryant neighbourhood by the end of the year – and local residents are “all in,” says Krystal Steward.

Older members of the community are particularly excited, Steward says, noting that many are on fixed incomes and will particularly benefit from lower energy bills. “It’s hard for me to keep up,” she says. “Now it’s not me reaching out to residents to sign up – they’re blowing up my phone.”

Carey L. Biron reports on sustainable cities, inclusive development and local solutions. He is based in Washington, D.C. 

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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Of course we need to achieve net-zero by 2050: it’s a chemical necessity for the atmosphere. But this is hardly a goal that your average person can see and touch and wrap their arms around.

Compounding the difficulty is that 2050 is a quarter century away. What do the signposts of success look like between now and then? How do we make sure we’re on track? Where do we course-correct if we’re not?

One way that countries have tried to define progress is by measuring the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The landmark Paris Agreement, signed a decade ago, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Countries determine themselves what contributions they should make to achieve the aims of the agreement. These plans, called nationally determined contributions (NDCs), are required to be “ambitious efforts” toward “achieving the purpose of this Agreement” and to “represent a progression over time.” The contributions are to be set every five years and registered with the United Nations.

Similar to many other nations, Canada has enshrined its Paris Agreement commitments in a national law, the Canada Net-Zero Emissions Accountability Act, adopted by Parliament in 2021. Under this act, the federal government has rolled out its Emissions Reduction Plan that it regularly updates.

For Canadians, decarbonization is a patriotic act

Unsurprisingly, given that the global community has consciously structured the climate change issue around these yearly measurements of emissions reduction, that’s the primary lens through which the public now views the discussion. A significant proportion of climate change media headlines relate to emissions targets being met, or not met.

Don’t get me wrong: I think this Paris Agreement approach has been useful. Like Canada, most countries in the world have methodically catalogued every scrap of carbon emissions and created policy architectures to start knocking them back. That’s led to a substantial reduction in projected future warming – close to one full degree Celsius by century’s end.

But a decade on from the Paris Agreement, I don’t think that communicating to the public the success or failure of climate progress in terms of megatonnes of carbon reduced – putting this in the metaphorical window every chance we get – is the best we can do.

For one thing, and as I’ve already observed above, it’s not really comprehensible or tangible for most people.

For another, there are better, more compelling stories of success or failure to tell. Let’s take electric vehicles as one example. When the Paris Agreement was signed, electric vehicles were less than 1% of new vehicle sales around the world. Today, they are more than 25% and rising fast. The boom in electric vehicles is actually resulting in less demand for oil and less greenhouse gas emissions. The International Energy Agency, for example, pegged the total number of barrels of oil displaced by EV adoption at more than 1.3 million barrels per day in 2024. The agency expects that number to rise to more than five million barrels per day by 2030.

Most compelling of all, EVs are just better machines than gasoline-powered cars. Anyone who drives one loves them and saves money in the long term (especially when the price of oil skyrockets because of the type of international conflicts we’re seeing at the moment).

Heat pumps are another example. In 2015, globally, heat pumps were generally a marginal technology. Now: heat pumps outsell gas furnaces in the United States and in many markets. And because they are more efficient than natural gas furnaces, and run by electricity, they are starting to measurably reduce carbon emissions.

A fork in the road for the Canadian climate change discussion

The rate of uptake of electric vehicles and heat pumps is an extremely important measure of climate change progress. As opposed to emission reductions, they are visible, tangible things.

So as a way of refocusing the climate change discussion in a positive direction, the Canadian Climate Institute is going to start tracking these indicators of progress such as EV and heat pump sales data in the months ahead.

This is also a way of holding governments to account. The recent announcement by Prime Minister Mark Carney that the federal government is aiming for 75% of new cars sold by 2035 to be EVs is a clear commitment. And it’s an opportunity to ensure that the package of policies he has released will get us to that goal.

As I’ve said before in this space, the climate change discussion is a marathon, not a sprint. It has evolved over decades and will continue to do so. The way we talk about the issue in order to ensure that it gets the attention it needs in a volatile world requires constant reinvention to ensure that we’re connecting with our audiences.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post What does climate change progress look like? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naomi Buck is a Toronto-based writer.  

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

Since I was a teenager, this has been my favourite quote. It hits home with the message that everything we do matters, and that, like the butterfly effect, you never know what mighty waves will rise from tiny ripples.

My second favourite quote served as the unofficial slogan for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, borrowed from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and ask, ‘Why?’ I dream things that never were and ask, ‘Why not?’”

My third: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

These three quotes capture why the Global 100 exists: to amplify the ripples, to show what is possible, and to ensure the sound is heard.

The journey started 25 years ago when I knocked on the door of sustainability research pioneer Michael Jantzi (founder of what became Morningstar Sustainalytics) to see if he would help us produce our first ranking of Canada’s best corporate citizens. He agreed, and as a token of gratitude – after we published the ranking in Canada’s largest business newspaper – I gave him a framed copy with a plaque that read “You measure, we publish, they change.”

In 2005, we launched the Global 100 in partnership with Innovest Strategic Value Advisors (which later became MSCI ESG), founded by the visionary genius Matthew Kiernan. By necessity – and because of the sorry state of disclosure – those early rankings violated almost every tenet of a meaningful benchmark, except one. While they did rely on opaque black-box methodologies measuring supposedly hundreds of indicators, there was a shared purity of intention among our early collaborators: identify the 100 large companies from around the world, across sectors, doing the most to move the needle toward a more sustainable world where people can thrive in tandem with the planet.

By 2010, we brought the research in-house and made the methodology 100% transparent. This became a core tenet of our approach and a litmus test whereby anyone could replicate our results. As Don Lindsay, former CEO of Teck Resources, put it, “We like the Global 100 because it is clear why we are in or out and what we need to do.”

Disclosure limitations initially constrained us to measuring operational aspects of companies like emissions, taxes paid and board diversity. While these things all matter, the vagaries of voluntary disclosure meant we were often penalizing the best reporters, and on a bigger-picture scale we were missing what mattered most: the portion of a company’s core business that actually moves the world in a more sustainable direction.

In 2018, we came up with a rules-based industry-by-industry definition of sustainability and introduced the clean revenue indicator that measured what portion of a company’s revenue was sustainable. This evolved into sustainable revenues, then sustainable investment and aligned compensation.

The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

This year, after passing 27 red-flag basic exclusionary hurdles (including board diversity and taxes paid), the Global 100 ranking is now 100% based on the portion of a business that makes the world more sustainable. We’re not abandoning operational impact – rather we’re doubling down on a more powerful measure. Much of the operational impact we once struggled to measure is now captured in our publicly available Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy, which clearly defines what is sustainable in each industry and is updated with further texture each year.

For more than two decades, we have stayed the course in our quest to help companies embrace the sustainability revolution. All along the way, we have been guided by three core principles:

1. Pure intention. This is our north star.
2. Focus on what matters most. Less is often more.
3. Radical transparency. This way, others can trust but verify our work.

Guided by our principles, we made the tough decision to let go of roughly 25 key performance indicators to focus on just four metrics: the portion of revenues and investment that are sustainable, how fast sustainable revenues are growing, and what percent of CEO compensation is linked to sustainability.

Since the founding of the Global 100 ranking, we have invested countless hours collecting data on all those different metrics, trying to get the angel in the detail right and defending the indicators in our ranking formula. The decision to simplify and refocus the ranking on our core mission did feel in part like a loss, but it puts us in a better place to weed out noise and tap into the signal to serve our core purpose of highlighting the business beacons for a more sustainable world.

We’re honoured to present this year’s Global 100 companies. These organizations show what kind of world is possible, sending out fast-growing ripples that give us a chance to rise to meet the mighty challenges of our time.

Toby Heaps is co-founder and publisher of Corporate Knights. 

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I’ve never bought a Canadian flag before. But I surprised myself when the daily Trump “51st state” insults ignited a desire in me to fly our country’s colours. Given how long the flag and flagpole I wanted were out of stock at Canadian Tire, it seems that many other Canadians felt the same.

This month’s avalanche of “year in review” articles on the Trump presidency (one down, three to go!) was a reminder of just how unprecedented this past year has been. And judging by the reaction to the prime minister’s speech in Davos, much of the Western world has had similar feelings.

Twelve months ago, would any of us have guessed that the very existence of our country would be regularly belittled by our alleged closest ally – our national sovereignty threatened by a late-night social media post? Or that some of our key industries, like steel and cars, would be fighting for their survival because of crushing Trump-imposed tariffs, or that European countries – NATO members – would be moving troops to Greenland in a not-so-subtle attempt to dissuade a U.S. invasion, with Canada under pressure to join too?

In 2026, there is every indication that Trump’s unhinged behaviour will get worse, not better.

He’s already referring to the Canada-U.S.-Mexico free trade agreement (CUSMA) – the renegotiation of which kicks off this year – as “irrelevant” to the United States and has targeted the Canadian automobile industry for extinction. He seems deadly serious about undermining the independence of the U.S. Federal Reserve and using his politicized Department of Justice to silence any criticisms.

Nothing about this is “business as usual.” And it has prompted an unprecedented degree of anxiety: roughly three-quarters of Canadians now believe the United States poses an economic threat, and 53% say it poses a national security threat as well.

Climate change policy is caught right in the middle of all of this.

As he explained at length in a speech at the United Nations in September of last year, Trump believes that climate change is a “con job” and that renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is a “scam” that should be eliminated. Instead, he is focused on dramatically expanding oil and gas production and recently demonstrated he is even prepared to forcibly depose foreign leaders to achieve this.

2025 was defined by uncertainty on climate policy in Canada that needs quick resolution

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, decarbonization is accelerating, not slowing down. We’ve seen it with electric vehicles, with renewable power, with global investment in clean technologies and with carbon border tariffs, to name just a few. And these trends are accelerating in the countries Canada needs to diversify its trade and strengthen its economic prospects.

Bottom line: things powered with fossil fuels are the technologies of the past. (And I mean this literally: sales of gasoline-powered cars peaked globally in 2018.) Things powered by electricity are the technologies of the future. Those countries that produce the building blocks of a decarbonized economy – including critical minerals, batteries, clean electricity, and electrical machines like heat pumps and EVs – will prosper. Those that don’t will be left behind.

The challenge for Canada is to escape the evil tractor beam of Trump’s bad ideas. To set a course of our own for the benefit of all Canadians.

Doing everything we can to decarbonize Canada isn’t just something we’re doing to reduce emissions. It’s a contribution to a better future for our country.

Yes, we need to deal with the clear threats posed by Trump in the short term, but at the same time we need to lay track for a decarbonized economy that is rapidly gaining momentum.

Decarbonization is an act of patriotism.

In amongst the recent “Trump year in review” media this month was a healthy dose of polling. Trump’s popularity is down. Way down. It turns out a U.S. electorate that supported him in hopes that he’d make their lives more affordable isn’t warming to his quixotic and destabilizing foreign policy interventions.

I don’t know exactly when, but sometime in the next few years – at this rate, starting with November’s U.S. midterm elections – the forces of MAGA are going to start losing. At that point, the damage from climate change will be more evident than ever, and the economic gravity of cheaper solar, batteries and EVs will be impossible to resist. Climate action will ramp up even stronger than before.

Canada needs strong climate policy to be competitive in countries beyond the U.S.

Our goal has to be to ensure that we have leapfrogged the United States by then to ensure that our economy is positioned to prosper.

We see the first inklings of what’s possible in this regard with recent news that the Trump administration’s unlawful quashing of New England offshore wind projects is increasing investment interest in Canadian projects. And the recent deal with China on EV tariffs is being positioned by our federal government as the first move in a strategy for Canada to build North American leadership in electric vehicles: smart.

In 2026, arguments for climate progress need to keep these global dynamics front and centre. The transition to a cleaner economy isn’t just the answer to the atmosphere’s chemical challenges, but to Canada’s economic ones as well.

In short, decarbonization should come wrapped in a Canadian flag.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post For Canadians, decarbonization is a patriotic act appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Ella, the chief sustainability officer of a multinational corporation, was hired to lead the organization toward ambitious net-zero emissions goals that the CEO is intent on delivering – despite political indications that it’s no longer a priority. Ella joined the company believing in its stated commitment to environmental responsibility. However, she discovers a troubling reality: key company stakeholders are prioritizing short-term profits over long-term sustainability, sabotaging both the CEO’s mandate and her work.

Ella is experiencing moral injury – a “first cousin” to trauma. Moral injury, as a concept, was first introduced in the 1990s by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, who defined it as profound psychological distress resulting from actions that violate one’s moral or ethical code, particularly in high-stakes situations involving betrayal by authority figures.

In the “AfterShock era” [the polycrisis period following what Alvin Toffler described as “future shock“], characterized by rapid technological advancements and societal shifts, organizations are thrust into environments of intense change, volatility and ethical ambiguity. For employees like Ella, the emotional and psychological toll of this shift is profound. As decision-making becomes erratic and public commitments ring hollow, moral injury emerges as a silent but powerful force shaping both her experience and how she performs her work.

How moral injury restructures work

Moral injury isn’t a label anyone wakes up with, and it doesn’t just sit in Ella’s mind – it reshapes how she performs her role, how she interacts with others and whether she believes in the work at all.

She experiences decision paralysis and second-guesses herself constantly. The ethical contradictions in leadership create a fog of uncertainty, making even routine decisions feel fraught.

Innovation suffocates. Where she once pushed for new sustainability solutions, she now self-censors, knowing they’ll be blocked by leadership. The company doesn’t just lose her engagement – it loses her creativity. She becomes so demotivated that she becomes helpless and angry. She’s likely to move to whistleblowing mode, burn out or quit.

Mistrust becomes contagious. She stops believing leadership’s messaging, and soon, so do her colleagues. Moral injury spreads like an emotional contagion, affecting teams beyond her own.

The risk for organizations

Unchecked moral injury doesn’t just affect one employee; it changes the culture, decision-making, communication, trust and the ethical foundation of the entire company. Employees become risk-averse, unwilling to challenge the status quo. Talented people leave, often quietly, draining institutional knowledge. The work itself degrades – products, policies and strategies become hollow, shaped more by survivalism than purpose.

This is why moral injury is not just a human issue; it is an operational crisis.

What it means for leaders

The chances are that you recognize Ella either in yourself or in others that you’ve worked with. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with this realization, you’re not alone.

As a CEO, executive or senior leader, you might be experiencing helplessness: “This is too big to fix. We’ll never get there.” Frustration, too: “Even when we try, external forces make it impossible to get this right.” Or, “Let’s hire someone else to do this who understands our business.”

These reactions are natural, but they’re also signals. They point to the ethical weight of leadership in today’s world. If you’re feeling this way, it doesn’t mean you’re failing – it means you want to find a solution.

But here’s the hard truth: leaders who ignore this discomfort risk making moral injury worse, not just for employees, but for themselves.

The cost of doing nothing

In our AfterShock era, we need systems thinking where we go beyond all the crises.

Across these domains, individuals experience a profound sense of powerlessness, ethical compromise and inaction fatigue, eroding their sense of moral integrity. This makes addressing moral injury not just a matter of individual well-being but a critical component of long-term organizational survival and ethical leadership.

By genuinely aligning values and actions, organizations can transform the hidden sabotage of moral injury into a catalyst for growth, integrity and long-term success. These traits are not just beneficial but essential by 2030. The alternatives – burnout, presenteeism, attrition and diminished innovation – will persist, eroding trust, morale and organizational resilience.

Caroline Stokes is a leadership strategist, author and certified executive coach. She is based in Vancouver. 

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The year started and ended with considerable uncertainty, but for different reasons. On the front end of the year, this was due to the federal election, where – depending on the outcome – a wholesale dismantling of Canada’s policy architecture was a real possibility.

But after a come-from-behind victory by Mark Carney’s Liberals, it became clear that the question ahead was a different one: what will Canada’s climate-policy approach include and how effective will it be at reducing emissions and supporting competitiveness in an era of disruption spawned by Donald Trump?

As the year comes to a close, we have a better idea of what some of that is likely to include: stronger industrial carbon pricing, stronger methane rules for oil and gas, finalized clean-electricity tax incentives, a climate investment taxonomy, support for critical minerals and more. But a fair number of these policy wins are still marked with ongoing uncertainty, including some of the most impactful on the list such as industrial carbon pricing.

Earlier in the year, my colleagues and I at the Canadian Climate Institute outlined a handful of top priorities the government could focus on to make meaningful policy progress. This was especially important given that our research showed that Canada was not going to be able to reach its 2030 emissions target and needed a course correction. That finding was confirmed this week by the federal government’s progress report on its climate plan.

Of the six policies we originally identified to get the country on the path to progress, three remain unfinished or uncertain.

Canada needs fast action on its new climate competitiveness strategy

The government has committed to strengthening industrial carbon pricing, but the details here will make or break this policy. Getting it right is especially important in light of the recent  memorandum of understanding with Alberta, which pushes any clarity on this out to April of next year.

The MOU agreement is vague on specific outcomes: it agrees to increase the minimum carbon credit price to $130 per tonne of emissions – roughly six times the current level – but it doesn’t define a timeline. To be credible, both governments need to agree that this price should be reached by 2030.

Already we’ve seen worrying signs. The ink was barely dry on the MOU when the Alberta government went tinkering with their carbon-pricing system to further weaken it, just one week after the signing.

On a more positive note, the federal government finalized stronger methane rules for the oil and gas sector. Action on methane is a no-brainer, representing some of the lowest-cost actions available. The feds and Alberta need to agree to an effective equivalency agreement to ensure that the level of reduction committed to by the federal government – 72% by 2030 – is achieved. But this is generally good policy news.

On clean electricity, the federal government is currently implementing its long-promised investment tax credits in legislation, which should be passed early next year. And while the government appeared to reaffirm its commitment to the Clean Electricity Regulations, the MOU again undermined that with a carve-out for Alberta.

That risks copy-cat requests from other provinces and a race to the bottom in other areas of climate policy. For the moment, we’re holding out hope that the two parties can negotiate something approaching equivalency on this file.

On electric vehicles, the government has paused its Electric Vehicle Availability Standard and consumer incentives, throwing into question one of the only policies Canada has to reduce emissions in the transportation sector.

Government has said that more information about the future of that policy should be coming soon, but the uncertainty has stymied EV sales in the country, which were previously rising steadily year over year. Maintaining a strong standard will help Canadians find better, more affordable vehicle options, while creating flexibility for vehicle manufacturers.

A fork in the road for the Canadian climate change discussion

The clearest case for progress has been with the federal government’s commitment to implement sustainable investment guidelines – also known as the climate taxonomy. The government has tasked the Canadian Climate Institute, working with Business Future Pathways, to do the technical work that will underpin the guidelines in order to help drive private investment into projects that are in line with the global energy transition.

Add it all together and we’re left with a policy picture that is still muddled.

That’s particularly unsettling given the stakes here: 2025 was also marked by the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history. That meant people were faced with evacuation orders and alerts, especially those in remote and Indigenous communities. It meant millions of Canadians saw their neighbourhoods blanketed in toxic wildfire smoke for days at a time. And B.C.’s Lower Mainland recently had its major highways cut off from the Interior of the province, and floodwater is pouring into Abbotsford after an atmospheric river drenched the coast. That’s eerily reminiscent of the 2021 atmospheric river event that devastated much of the province and left billions of dollars in economic losses in its wake.

Yet, when it comes to concrete actions to protect people and communities across Canada, much is left wanting from all orders of governments.

All this is happening as clean and electric technologies – like renewables, batteries and electric vehicles – continue their inexorable march to transform global energy markets.

That on its own holds enormous potential to dramatically reduce future damages from climate change. It also offers a massive opportunity for Canada to increase prosperity, support affordability and bolster competitiveness in a world responding to new trade relationships.

Looking to the year ahead, Canada needs to resolve the policy uncertainty that’s standing in the way of progress as soon as possible. The problems we face are urgent, but the solutions are right in front of us.

No more grandiose rhetoric please: all I want for Christmas is some concrete delivery of long-promised climate change policy by Canadian governments.

Rick Smith is president of the Canadian Climate Institute, the co-author of two bestselling books on the effects of pollution on human health, and the executive producer of Plastic People, a 2024 documentary chronicling the damage done by microplastics in the human body.

The post 2025 was defined by uncertainty on climate policy in Canada that needs quick resolution appeared first on Corporate Knights.

This story was originally published by Canary Media. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

At the start of next year, companies that make and buy energy-intensive commodities like steel and aluminum will enter the era of CBAM – the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

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