That hard work is often hard to see, the product of millions of Canadians and thousands of businesses quietly, persistently adopting new approaches to life and work, eschewing waste, prioritizing collaboration and generally learning to do more with less. Since 2002, Corporate Knights has recognized this work by publishing the Best 50 list of Canada’s top corporate citizens – the businesses that prize sustainability as well as commerce.

Now in its 23rd year, the Best 50 helps track how Canadian businesses are meeting the low-carbon and green-transition challenge – as well as where they’re getting stuck in the process.

You already know many of these companies – you’ve ridden their buses (Société de transport de Montréal), pocketed their coins (Royal Canadian Mint), used their phone networks (BCE, Telus and Rogers), shopped there (Canadian Tire) or bought the T-shirt (Gildan Activewear). The companies that made the Best 50 are mostly corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenues, as well as Crown corporations, large co-ops and members of the S&P/TSX Renewable Energy and Clean Technology Index. What sets them apart is their commitment to doing business differently – they’re companies that derive significant revenue from greener products and services, invest in increasingly sustainable projects, and prioritize equity in their operations.

Crucially, the companies’ average sustainable investment (as a percentage of total investment) hit 58.9% this year, up 9% over last year’s 49.7% – that’s compared to just 8.4% for the average large Canadian corporation.

2024 Best 50 ranking table

*Indicates a tie as a result of a formula correction
**Revised rank due to a formula correction

“How a company invests its capital expenditures today is a major determinant of how sustainable its revenue will be tomorrow. The fact that we’re seeing a significant jump in sustainable investments among Best 50 companies tells us that more corporate leaders see sustainability as a business imperative,” says Michael Yow, director of corporate rankings at Corporate Knights. There’s also evidence that companies can do better by doing good. Since the inception of this list on June 1, 2002, the stock prices of publicly listed companies on the Best 50 have outperformed the S&P/TSX Composite Index by 80% (as of April 30, 2024).

Driving into first place

In first place on the list this year is a different kind of public company: Société de transport de Montréal (STM) gets 85.4% of its revenues from delivering greener public transit. Better still, Corporate Knights researchers found that 82.3% of STM’s capital investments (up from 45.8% last year) now go toward building low-carbon infrastructure – including the expansion of its Metro line and a large underground garage to support subway service expansion.

Beyond cutting carbon, STM stands out for its commitment to equity and inclusion. In an era of runaway executive compensation, its CEO earns just 5.2 times more than the company’s average worker – well below the Best 50 average of 76 times. In addition, women make up half of the company’s board of directors, and STM has committed to “universal accessibility,” striving to minimize barriers to the use of transit for all its customers – even as it maintains a personalized para-transit service.

Second-place Stantec, which calls itself “a global leader in sustainable design and engineering,” is also committed to building sustainable cities. Ranked as the world’s ninth-most-sustainable company earlier this year on Corporate Knights’ Global 100 list, Edmonton-based Stantec has built its latest three-year strategic plan on “purpose-driven growth.” To Stantec, the climate crisis is one big opportunity; it’s focusing in particular on the energy transition, coastal resilience, ecosystem restoration, smart cities and international development.

The Best 50 includes many firms in industries central to the energy transition, such as power generation and transmission (which includes a whopping 14 companies, from giants such as Hydro-Québec and Ontario’s Hydro One to renewables specialists such as Innergex – last year’s top company – and Brookfield Renewable). But the list also identifies values-based companies in many other sectors, including manufacturing (six), communications (five), banks and insurance (four), and rail transportation, engineering services and forest products (two each). More evidence that any company, in any industry, can choose a more sustainable path.

The fact that we’re seeing a significant jump in sustainable investments among Best 50 companies tells us that more corporate leaders see sustainability as a business imperative.

–Michael Yow, director of corporate rankings, Corporate Knights

This year’s Best 50 list also demonstrates that the road to the future is not perfectly straight. For instance, CEOs are still pushing the limits on executive compensation. While the average ratio of CEO pay to average employee pay dropped this year to 76:1 from 108:1 among last year’s Best 50 cohort, that stemmed mainly from unusually large decreases at just two companies compared to 2023. Our researchers report that, of the companies appearing on both years’ lists, 21 firms green-lit increases in their CEO pay ratios, and just 13 managed decreases.

In another sign of fitful progress, executive gender diversity improved to just 28.4% this year, versus 26.8% last year. But while there are still more CEOs named Michael than there are female CEOs in Canada, 12% of Best 50 companies are led by women. Especially making their presence felt are Marie-Claude Léonard, a 20-year STM veteran who leads the top firm on the list; Tracy Robinson, appointed CEO of Canadian National Railway in 2022, who is the first Canadian woman to run a national railroad; Marie Lemay, who heads the most-improved organization, the Royal Canadian Mint; and Mairead Lavery, who runs Export Development Canada, the company with the lowest ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay.

Climate commitments legend

1.5°C: Business Ambition for 1.5C

SBTi: Science Based Targets initiative

FCCA: Fashion Charter for Climate Action

NZAM: Net-Zero Asset Managers Initiative

NZAO: Net-Zero Asset Owners Alliance

NZBA: Net-Zero Banking Alliance

The post These 50 Canadian corporations are betting big on green appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Click here to find out what companies made the 2024 list of Canada’s Best 50 corporate citizens.

The post Who are Canada’s top international corporate citizens of 2024? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Yet in the transit-friendly annals of Montreal mobility, STM last year was overshadowed by a fresh-faced regional counterpart, the very new light-rail operator known as Réseau express métropolitain (REM). Last summer, VIPs gathered for the ribbon cutting of the first leg of REM’s shiny new LRT network, which is operated by a public–private partnership, will cost $8 billion and will eventually connect the island with its mainland suburbs. REM had barely carried its first passengers before it made international news, thanks to per-kilometre construction costs that came in dramatically lower than most comparable transit ventures.(REM has also faced criticism for construction delays and missed deadlines.)

However, STM’s accomplishments for 2023, though far less sexy, are much more salient in terms of Montreal’s push to slash emissions. The agency’s ridership finally broke free of the post-pandemic/work-from-home doldrums, reaching 82% of its pre-2020 levels – the third highest for all North American transit operators and well ahead of rivals like the Toronto Transit Commission (73%) and New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (65%). Even more remarkably, STM’s 2023 ridership jumped by 21% from 2022, reaching almost 230 million trips.

“Our vision is to be a leader in sustainable mobility,” says CEO Marie-Claude Léonard, who’s been with the agency 21 years and CEO since 2022. “This leads us to go even further in integrating sustainable development at the heart of all our organization’s activities. Our ambition is that each of our actions and decisions take into account the impacts on human life, the planet and economic sustainability.”

So here’s the question: what exactly makes a transit agency sustainable, above and beyond its raison d’être as well as the convenient fact that Quebec’s electrical grid is almost entirely green? As it turns out, STM – which tops this year’s Corporate Knights Best 50 ranking – has several answers to what may seem like an obvious question.

Take, for example, its bus fleet. As with many municipal transit operators, those vehicles were, once upon a time, entirely diesel, meaning they spewed fumes, particles and carbon into the city’s air. But STM has moved quite aggressively to replace its end-of-life diesel buses with hybrids and electrics. Today, 42% of its buses fall into one of those two categories, and the agency is aiming to have an entirely electric fleet by 2040 (i.e., no more hybrids). The plan is to house them all in a vast underground garage (albeit one that has gone way overbudget).

NYC’s MTA, by contrast, is still fiddling around with a hydrogen fuel cell bus pilot, while the TTC, which has been running hybrid and some electric buses for several years, is bogged down with supply chain issues as it tries to transition its fleet.

Another: the organization, like most others these days, has put out all sorts of ambitious long-term strategic plans that aim to cut carbon. But STM has made sure its senior management team has skin in the game. “The performance contracts of our managers, executive committee and CEO include targets related to service offering, health and safety, and employee mobilization, all of which contribute to maximizing the benefits of public transit,” it says.

What’s going on here is that STM has focused on driving ridership growth, a goal that transit aficionados love but which requires more effort from politicians, who love to announce big-ticket expansion projects and then turn up at the VIP events when they open.

It’s true that STM has a big project on the books: a five-station extension of the Metro network. But the agency is intent on rebuilding all that ridership lost during and after the pandemic, which is tough sledding, as many other cities have discovered. (Its capacity to build out the subway network further is sharply limited by funding freezes imposed by the provincial government, as well as competition from REM’s light-rail network.)

Our ambition is that each of our actions and decisions take into account the impacts on human life, the planet and economic sustainability.

—CEO Marie-Claude Léonard

Part of its fleet transition strategy, for instance, is intended to provide riders with the smoother and quieter rides that e-buses deliver. “The fact that they emit fewer GHGs will attract new customers that are looking for even more sustainable ways to commute,” the agency says.

STM is also pushing to steadily expand the network of bus priority routes – that is, those with bus-only lanes and traffic lights programmed to give buses a head start. “In 2023,” according to an agency spokesperson, “34% of bus trips made use of reserved lanes and 39% made use of priority traffic lights.” Again, the goal is to get riders to their destinations as quickly and conveniently as possible – an approach that is known to drive up ridership numbers (and thus reduce the use of carbon-emitting private vehicles).

The agency moved to add security on its vehicles and in its stations following a threefold jump in complaints from riders about the presence of homeless or intoxicated people and open substance abuse. While STM is hardly unique in contending with this particular set of rider gripes – symptomatic of the housing affordability crisis that afflicts so many big cities now, as well as the opioid epidemic – the agency tries to cast its response as a way of building loyalty and increasing, or at least not losing, ridership.

Whatever Léonard and STM’s 11,000-plus employees are doing, it seems to be working. Unlike the inhabitants of many other big cities, Montrealers appear to have gotten back into the transit habit, which surely comes as close to the definition of sustainability as it gets these days.

Click here to find out what other companies made the 2024 Best 50.

The post Montreal’s transit corporation drives into top spot of Canada’s best corporate citizens for 2024 appeared first on Corporate Knights.