I have had a lot of jobs in my life, from putting up a shingle as a seven-year-old private detective for hire, to batboy, paperboy, Fairmount bagel bagger, centre fielder for Yugoslavia and rickshaw runner in Toronto – but head of Corporate Knights takes the cake.
For the past two decades, we have helped to fan what was once considered the quaint idea of stakeholder capitalism (where companies serve us instead of the other way around) into a full-blown social movement. Today, this sustainable brand of business is the main competitive advantage for many of the world’s leading corporations – as evidenced by the 18-year track record of financial out-performance by Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens and our Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations Index.
Our formula has been a well-measured recipe of management guru Peter Drucker (“What gets measured gets managed”), two of my forefathers (“Carrots motivate people to act” and “Always respect justice but question authority”) and my late social worker mother (“If you believe in people, anything is possible”).
We have shared (and sometimes force-fed) this recipe with many of the world’s most powerful companies and governments, who listen because they know that our research and reporting cannot be dismissed. After 17 years of pushing the idea of stakeholder capitalism on the Davos crowd from the sidelines, the World Economic Forum adopted our mantra as its credo in 2021.
We also popularized – and in some cases catalyzed – many big ideas that are now central features of our economy: from pricing pollution and putting the money back in people’s pockets, to board diversity requirements, mandatory sustainability reporting and carbon budgets for large funds and companies. We planted the seed to make Toronto a global hub for sustainable finance with 100,000 new jobs and helped spawn the Financial Centres for Sustainability network, launched by the G7 in 2017, as well as Canada’s $8-billion net-zero accelerator to speedup green businesses and jobs.
We took the fight to investors in 2022, offering them a special view into who will own the low-carbon economy of tomorrow, with a unique database showing which companies are plowing the most into green capital expenditures. Earlier this year, we struck a transformational partnership with one of Canada’s largest asset managers (Mackenzie Investments) to share the financial gains of Global 100 companies with the masses in one simple solution that anyone with $20 can invest in.
But on my daily runs with my friend Karim (and now my late mother’s wolf-shepherd Molly), I heard myself increasingly sounding like the “critic” in Teddy Roosevelt’s“The Man in the Arena” speech. I was on the sidelines pointing out “where the doer of deeds could have done them better.” I didn’t like the sound of it and decided I would jump in the political arena with bold ideas – in a few years’ time, when my boys were older.
But then the salt started to sting. I am talking about the excessive salt that the City of Toronto lathers all over the streets in the winter that was burning Molly’s paws, not to mention the billions it costs Torontonians to prematurely replace our corroding cars, shoes and the Gardiner Expressway. When I found out that many other cities, like my home-town Calgary, had long ago found less toxic and more affordable, effective solutions to keep the roads safe, I got a little mad.
When the premier of Ontario threatened to lock Molly and me out of our daily running routine by privatizing one of our most wonderful public spaces, Ontario Place, into a mega spa for millionaires, I set a new course. We could not sit on the sidelines for this once-in-a-generation by-election for the mayor of Toronto. We had to get in the arena together – bringing all my entrepreneurial energy and Molly’s love for, well, everyone.
It may sound strange to run for the highest office of North America’s fourth-largest city alongside a dog (to be clear, I am the human candidate on the ballot and Molly would be Toronto’s first honorary dog mayor, following in the footsteps of Niagara Falls, Ontario, and cities in California, Minnesota and Kentucky),but I believe we make more compassionate decisions with animals around.
Win or lose, I hope Molly and I inspire other unusual suspects to take a chance at stepping into the arena. In the words of Teddy Roosevelt, we will strive to spend our-selves in a worthy cause; and at the worst, if we fail, at least we will fail while daring greatly, so that our place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat
