Vancouver’s community-minded credit union Vancity leapt into action, reducing credit card interest rates to zero, buying back foreign currencies from customers who’d had travel plans cancelled, at the same rates as they had been sold, offering small businesses emergency zero-interest working capital, and waiving ATM and Interac e-transfer fees. In addition to a $1 million Community Response Fund to support Vancouver groups fighting the pandemic, it also set up a Unity Term Deposit, which raised an impressive $200 million in just one month – money that’s being used to fund programs that will directly support those affected by COVID-19.

A number of Canadian businesses scrambled, innovated and retooled to solve medical supply shortages and pandemic-related breakdowns in global supply chains. Ontario Power Generation dug through its inventory and found more than one million surgical masks, 75,000 N95 masks and 17,500 protective suits that it shipped to Ontario’s Ministry of Health in March. The company also donated $900,000 to emergency food support.
Transportation equipment giant Bombardier used its manufacturing muscle to combat the shortage of medical supplies by retooling its Thunder Bay, Ontario, railcar plant to produce crucial parts for 18,000 ventilators for delivery to the Ontario government. Similarly, Bombardier’s engineering site in Saint-Bruno, Quebec, pivoted to produce 40,000 visors for healthcare workers who are most at risk in the pandemic.

Sustainable packaging producer Cascades started manufacturing a million pre-cut recycled plastic medical visors for Bauer, a sports-equipment manufacturer turned PPE producer.

Not coincidentally, all these companies are on our 2020 list of Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens. These homegrown heroes are not only leading the charge against the coronavirus, they are strategically adopting more sustainable business practices that demonstrate their commitment to a healthier world.

The journey to more sustainable lifestyles is a long one, and progress is measured in years. But calamities such as COVID tend to strip away the rhetoric to expose individuals and organizations for who they truly are. In these tough times, Corporate Knights is pleased to see that the companies we consider role models in the shift to sustainable civil society have also proved to be generous leaders in a time of crisis.

It’s all connected. Companies that embrace environmental measures, diversity and responsible risk management aren’t just better prepared for the climate crisis and public emergencies; they are actively strengthening themselves in a fast-moving economy that increasingly rewards speed, resilience, empathy and innovation. Good citizenship isn’t a constraint – it’s an opportunity.

The 2020 Best 50 ranking includes well-known consumer staples, such as our No. 1 company this year, Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC), as well as High Liner Foods and Canadian Tire, and industrial giants such as Cascades, Agnico Eagle Mines and RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust. As in previous years, the list is peppered with financial institutions (10) and utilities (13), which is great news for the future: utilities are key partners in reducing greenhouse gases and embracing new technologies, while we need clear-sighted banks, credit unions and pension-fund managers to fund the cleantech revolution.

We’re also pleased to see a wide spectrum of industries represented, including cleantech (Canadian Solar, Secure Energy Services), natural foods (SunOpta), media (Transcontinental), telecom (Telus, Cogeco), airlines (Transat A.T.) and mining (Teck, Agnico Eagle). It’s a reminder that any company, in any industry, can choose to do the right things.

Corporate Knights ranks the Best 50 Corporate Citizens on 21 key performance indicators. We scrutinize their percentage of clean revenue, board and executive gender diversity, GHG and waste productivity, employee turnover, innovation efforts, and even the amount of taxes they pay, along with a dozen other factors.

By recognizing genuine advancements on the road to cleaner capitalism, the Best 50 reinforces good behaviours, sets higher standards and seeds hope. To those who think that all corporations are venal, that climate change can’t be stopped, these 50 leaders demonstrate that, as Telus (No. 20) likes to say, “The future is friendly.”

When COVID struck, Vancouver-based Telus lived up to its branding as “Canada’s Most Giving Company.” In addition to waiving some service charges and offering its clients more flexible payment options during lockdown, Telus has invested some $150 million to support COVID relief. Among its initiatives, it’s offering free phone service to frontline healthcare workers; donating more than 10,000 devices, tablets and prepaid SIM cards to help isolated seniors, hospitalized patients and vulnerable Canadians stay connected; and supporting communities with $10 million in medical technology and equipment.

While mining giant Teck Resources took some heat for keeping its B.C. mines open during the COVID emergency, it used its supplier network to procure a million N95 masks to donate to B.C. healthcare workers. And that’s just a part of the $20 million COVID-19 Response Fund Teck launched to aid medical research; support local healthcare and social services in Canada, Alaska and Chile; and fund international relief efforts.

Customer relief has also been on companies’ minds. In April, when many businesses were struggling to pay the monthly rent, retail property trust RioCan offered independent commercial tenants a 60-day, interest-free rent deferral, repayable within a year. RioCan said it’s committed to its clients and to “finding solutions on a case-by-case basis to support their businesses.”

In Alberta, EPCOR Utilities, an Edmonton-based provider of municipal water systems, offered to defer customers’ bill payments for 90 days. It also donated $300,000 to the United Way and the Edmonton Community Foundation, a contribution that was then matched by the Alberta government.

Best 50 company donations poured into Canada’s food banks and charities across the country, with companies such as Canadian Pacific, Canadian Tire, Sun Life, Brookfield Asset Management and others donating millions to emergency COVID relief.

The financial institutions that comprise so much of the Best 50 list have also stepped up. In addition to the Vancity efforts already cited, Bank of Montreal, Desjardins, RBC and HSBC Bank Canada and others raced to offer financial relief for hard-hit personal and business clients, including many deferrals on payments of loans, credit cards and lines of credit.

As well, the banks undertook new COVID-related philanthropic activities. For instance, BMO donated $1 million to the United Way to support newly exposed gaps in community services. RBC committed $2 million to support local response efforts, including food banks, as well as the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. TD Bank committed $25 million to the TD Community Resilience Initiative, a “strategic philanthropy” initiative to support communities and organizations across North America responding to COVID-19 and supporting community recovery.

Sudden crises can reveal deep fractures in society. But they can also inspire innovative, big-hearted behaviours that recognize our mutual dependence and shared humanity.

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The rise of Webex gives Cisco a new way to mix business with social responsibility. Growth of video conferencing and telehealth can not only reduce the carbon footprint of business and healthcare, but also enable more equitable distribution of services to disadvantaged communities.

In other words, it may be hard to displace Cisco Systems Canada from the top of Corporate Knights’ list of Canada’s Top International Corporate Citizens – a title it has now earned two years in a row.

The list comprises non-Canadian companies on the 2020 Global 100 ranking of the Most Sustainable Corporations in the World that derive at least $1 billion of their revenues in Canada.

Cisco was founded in Silicon Valley in 1984 by Sandy Lerner and Leonard Bosack, computer technicians at Stanford University. Their goal of developing new hardware to help computers communicate peaked at just the right time. Today Cisco is a $50-billion-a-year giant in networking, software, cloud computing and collaborative work platforms.

Branding itself as a bridge to the future (its logo is the Golden Gate Bridge), Cisco is a strong supporter of social responsibility. CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in the company’s 2019 corporate-social-responsibility report: “We see massive opportunities for our innovation, expertise, and culture to play a role in finding solutions to some of society’s biggest challenges . . . including partnering with governments to accelerate digitization goals, advocating for data security and privacy, and empowering the next-generation workforce.”

Cisco’s first-place ranking stems from various achievements, including the highest clean-revenue score in its industry peer group, growing investment in innovation, and a high ratio (42%) of women in executive management.
In a CEO community still dominated by white males, Cisco Canada president and CEO Rola Dagher is not just a woman, but a refugee whose family left war-torn Lebanon 30 years ago. She too is a bridge: Dagher heads a career-development group called Connected Women that helps young female employees feel that they belong at Cisco and can help make a difference.

Cisco has responded proactively to the pandemic. To support remote workers, it made Webex services free to businesses. It also allocated $8 million in cash and $210 million in in-kind products to support medical facilities, education, and government response efforts.

While video conferencing has been around for two decades, it’s finally reaching its potential. Case in point: in March, the Toronto-based Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) deployed Webex technology across the organization for use by more than 400 CAMH clinicians. From March to April alone, “virtual-care” patient visits across Ontario rose from 350 to 3,000.

“Cisco understands how critical technology can be in bridging gaps, breaking down barriers and connecting the unconnected,” says Dagher. “This pandemic has fuelled the digital revolution in mental health services – it’s been a catalyst for delivering remote care at scale and helping those in need get access during a difficult time.”

Who are this year’s top international corporate citizens in Canada? They include companies that earn over $1 billion in revenues in Canada, are not listed or headquartered in Canada and have the highest scores on the Corporate Knights Sustainability Rating methodology employed for the 2020 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World.

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Since it was founded in 1971 by a group of west coast mountaineers looking for a place to buy reliable and affordable gear, MEC has vowed to do business differently by building a co-op with democratic principles, as an alternative to private ownership. The company says its grassroots foundation still exists, which is to “make things happen, deal fairly, find strength in community, and inspire adventure.”

Nearly 50 years later, the Vancouver-based company has grown to 22 stores across Canada and strengthened its sustainability efforts through responsible product sourcing, a commitment to shrink its environmental footprint and the championing of social causes.

MEC was the first Canadian retailer to publicly disclose its list of factories and their locations, is a longstanding Bluesign member (ensuring the use of sustainable ingredients and production in the textile industry), and traces its down and wool to ensure that animal welfare standards are being met. The company has also recognized and worked to correct some of its own flaws over the years, including low representation of people of colour in promotional materials.

MEC’s past environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance landed the co-op in the top spot on the Corporate Knights 2020 Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada ranking, based on data from the company’s public disclosures for the period from Feb. 26, 2018, to Feb. 24, 2019, which is its 2018/19 fiscal year. (The data doesn’t reflect impacts from COVID-19.) MEC’s overall score of 85.2% was a significant increase from its 2019 ranking, when it placed 17th, with an overall score of 66%.

“MEC has a very compelling, powerful social purpose,” says Coro Strandberg, a sustainability strategist and president of Vancouver’s Strandberg Consulting. “It doesn’t surprise me that a social-purpose company would become a global sustainability leader.”

MEC’s top marks in the ranking come largely in three areas: clean revenue, CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio and gender diversity on its board and executive leadership team. The company’s clean revenue score – a measure of revenue from all goods and services that have clear environmental and, in some cases, social benefits – was 100%. MEC had the highest clean revenue percentage in this year’s ranking in comparison to its retail industry peers.
For the 2018/19 fiscal year, the MEC Label produced 80 fair-trade-certified products, and more than 1,100 products were made with environmentally preferred materials (including organically grown or recycled content, responsibly sourced down and Bluesign-approved textiles). In fact, 88% of MEC Label clothes and sleeping bags were Bluesign approved, and the company is striving to hit 100%.

MEC also scored well for its ratio of CEO-to-average-worker pay, which, according to its disclosures for the 2018/19 fiscal year, was 15:1. (The smaller the ratio, the smaller the gap between CEO and employee earnings; by comparison, Zara’s parent company, Inditex, has a ratio of 357:1.) MEC says the calculation is based on regular wages, overtime, vacation pay and bonuses for all MEC employees, both hourly and salaried staff, in the 2018 pay calendar year.
It also increased its ranking based on the number of women in executive roles. MEC maintains a 50% ratio of women on its executive management team, which is the highest score in its industry in Canada, according to data sourced by Corporate Knights, and the fifth highest in the world within its industry.

In 2018, former MEC CEO David Labistour acknowledged in an open letter that the company was underrepresenting people of colour in its marketing and advertising and vowed to do better.

CEO Phil Arrata, who took the top job in July 2019 after serving on MEC’s board from 2015 to 2018, wasn’t available for an interview for this article. In an email through a company spokesperson, Arrata said MEC “is dedicated to being inclusive” among its more than 2,700 employees and its customers. “We want to make sure that everyone feels welcome at our stores, distribution centres and home office,” Arrata stated. “I am very proud of the many MEC staffers who have been integral to the development of the initiatives we have in place right now.”

Arrata also renewed the Outdoor Industry CEO Diversity Pledge, to hire and support a diverse workforce and leadership team, among other promises. In January, MEC made changes to its workforce, saying it would convert about 950 casual, non-permanent roles into full- or part-time jobs with benefits to reduce staff turnover and improve customer service.

The changes are part of a restructuring to restore the co-op’s financial health. “While MEC is not profit-driven in the same way as the retailers we compete against, we still must be profitable to ensure we deliver great service to our members, elevate employee experiences and continue to contribute to the communities where we live, work and play,” Arrata wrote in an open letter in January.

The company’s challenge going forward will be to sustain its ESG performance amid an extremely difficult financial situation. MEC said it lost $11.5 million for the year ended Feb. 24, 2019, on sales of $462.4 million. The results included $8.5 million in restructuring and reorganization costs. The previous year, it saw a profit of $11.7 million on sales of $454.8 million. In April, the company said the economic impact of COVID-19, which forced the retailer to temporarily close its brick-and-mortar locations, “is severe” and sales “have experienced a drastic decline.”

How MEC emerges from the coronavirus shutdowns, including its ESG actions and commitments, will determine its future growth.

Brenda Bouw is a freelance writer and editor, as well as an author and ghostwriter based in Vancouver. 

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