This is the second time Innergex, a renewables developer, operator and owner, has been ranked number one by the Corporate Knights Best 50 index. Previously holding the position in 2023, this is the first time it leads the list under the newly revamped scoring methodology, which focus more squarely on sustainable revenue and sustainable investment, as well as – crucially – the compound annual growth rate of sustainable revenue.

Innergex’s financial footing is now stronger than ever, thanks to its July 2025 acquisition by Quebec pension fund manager La Caisse (formerly the CDPQ) in a deal valued at nearly $10 billion, of which La Caisse paid $2 billion. The Quebec investment fund bought Hydro-Québec’s shares and allocated up to 20% of its investment to other long-term investors, to help Innergex defend against market shocks and focus on its long-term objectives. These investors include Investissement Québec (which invested $500 million), Quebec-based Desjardins Global Asset Management, and union-based fund manager Fondaction Asset Management, along with 14 Swiss institutional investors. Innergex has now been privatized as a result of the investment.

Gaining access to so much “patient capital” is critical for a company like Innergex, whose core business is building long-term infrastructure, CEO Jean Trudel says. “Building energy projects, whether it’s hydro, wind or solar, is a long-time investment,” he says. The slow-return capital deployed by La Caisse is essential for making these kinds of projects work, and the bank is “ready to deploy more capital to help us go further,” Trudel says.

Diversification and consolidation

Innergex currently produces 4,424 megawatts of clean energy, with another 12,000 megawatts in the ready-to-bid stage. “Innergex is planning to grow,” Trudel says, pointing to the company’s mission to decarbonize grids as a way to fight climate change.

The company now operates in four markets: Canada, the United States, France and Chile. It has also diversified beyond its roots in hydropower to focus now on hydro, wind, solar and battery storage, while bringing its expertise and technologies to foreign markets.

In 2025, Innergex switched on its Hale Kuawehi solar and battery storage plant in Hawaii. The project integrates 30 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity with four hours of battery storage. Innergex has since sold this project but remains active in battery projects elsewhere, like in France, where it is working with the Réseau de transport d’électricité to balance the country’s electricity system, using its Tonnerre nine megawatt-hour battery energy storage system.

Innergex is developing relationships with industries that also benefit from decarbonization, such as in Chile. Businesses are now open to having conversations about renewable sources powering their operations, Trudel says, including mining companies BHP and Codelco. “It’s very valuable for an industry to be able to say it’s 100% renewable,” he says.

Innergex is also prepared to meet Hydro-Québec’s new focus on expanding solar energy generation through Quebec. In April, it announced in its first solar farm tender call for 60 projects.

Trudel dismisses claims that La Caisse plans to merge Innergex with another Quebec renewable powerhouse, Boralex. “We have no anticipation of being merged,” he says, acknowledging that it is a common question given that both companies are based in Quebec. La Caisse’s main mission is to stimulate the Quebec economy and protect Quebec-based businesses. “It’s not necessarily contradictory that the Caisse would support both.”

While Innergex has developed its offerings among multiple forms of renewable generation, there’s one arena it has decided to exit: geothermal. “As much as geothermal is a great energy source, it’s very different from the [energy] sources we have at the moment,” Trudel says. “It’s a lot more akin to mining, where you have to drill holes to get to the resource underground.”

Overall, the future for sustainable energy and for Innergex is bright, Trudel says. “The demand is strong, our positioning is good, and we have a strong owner with patient capital and deep pockets.”

Jax Jacobsen is a Montreal-based journalist who specializes in mining, business and climate.

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In economic circumstances like these, sustainability initiatives are often put on the back burner. But this year, the companies on Corporate Knights’ Best 50 Corporate Citizens list are reorienting their business models around energy resilience and green opportunities. As the Canadian economy navigates a major transition, these companies are proof that sustainability is one of the keys to boosting your bottom line for the long term.

Following a shift in methodology, the Best 50 ranking – click to jump to the table now – saw the arrival of 10 newcomers to the list from diverse industries, including real estate, transit, waste management and mining. In fact, the mining sector took six spots on this year’s list – only one fewer than the pure-play power generation companies that tend to dominate sustainability rankings.

Innergex Renewable Energy took the top spot, moving up from third in 2025, and last year’s top-ranked company, Boralex, another Quebec-based renewable-energy provider, dropped to seventh. Other notable movements in the ranking include Telus, which jumped from 15th to third position, and Cascades Inc., a packaging company that moved from 20th to eighth spot. Canadian Apartment Properties, the highest ranking of any new company on the list, came in at 16th, just ahead of Stantec, the second-ranked company last year.

Here are six more standout firms on this year’s list.

The pure-play pacesetter: Polaris (2)

The Toronto-based renewable-energy company Polaris has been steadily expanding its presence across Latin America and the Caribbean. Like other renewable-energy companies on the list, 100% of its revenues are deemed sustainable in the Corporate Knights methodology, yet its movement in the rankings – from 12th to second – is unique, owing to a 21% jump in revenues between 2022 and 2024. The company’s portfolio has now grown to include hydroelectric projects in Peru and Ecuador, a geothermal plant in Nicaragua, solar fields in Panama and the Dominican Republic, and most recently, a wind farm in Puerto Rico. In 2025 alone, the company estimated that these projects saved more than 346,148 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. With Polaris’s presence in emerging markets and its unique niche in the renewable-energy space, it has financially outperformed many of its industry competitors.

The fossil-fuel displacer: Kruger (5)

Kruger Products rose to fifth in the ranking from 34th last year, the second-largest year-over-year jump of any company. The company whose majority shareholder is Kruger Inc., a  fourth-generation family-run pulp and paper company, has expanded over its 122-year history to include clean-energy ventures and a much wider portfolio of everyday essential items like food packaging and labels. Kruger Products has brought to market innovative biomaterials and recycled paper products, displacing cheap fossil-fuel-based plastics. Business as usual at Kruger Products preserves millions of trees annually, and it was the first company in its category to obtain a certification from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a stalwart of forest preservation amid scandals with other, larger certifying bodies. Today, not only does the company produce more than 158 FSC-certified products, but it has invested in new facilities that produce exclusively these products.

The standard-setter: Eldorado Gold (20)

One of the top mining companies in the ranking, Eldorado Gold has been widely recognized as a pioneer of sustainable industry practices. It has mining operations in Canada as well as Turkey and Greece, and it has won several industry awards for environmental excellence. Most recently, its Kışladağ gold mine in Turkey won the Towards Sustainable Mining (TSM) Environmental Excellence Award for a solar-powered water infrastructure project. Designed in partnership with six villages near the mine, this new infrastructure services more than 350 households by eliminating the energy costs associated with pumping clean water. Back on home soil, Eldorado Gold’s Lamaque Complex in Quebec recently became one of just five mines in the world to receive a AAA environmental and social rating from the Mining Association of Canada for its exemplary management of mining waste, water stewardship, biodiversity conservation, and its Indigenous community relations.

The green grower: Vancity (9)

Canada’s largest community credit union, Vancity, registered the biggest increase in sustainable revenues over the ranking period, growing 266% from $4.69 million in 2022 to $65.23 million in 2024. It’s an impressive leap, but as director of rankings Michael Yow explains, Vancity went up because the company now discloses more investments that qualify as sustainable in the Corporate Knights methodology. Those investments haven’t significantly changed, and the company has a long-standing legacy of offering progressive financial products. It created Canada’s first socially responsible mutual fund, as well as its first registered education savings plan. Today, it offers innovative mortgages specifically for affordable housing, supports equity initiatives for marginalized communities, and offers environmental financial products from which some of the profits are donated to sustainability causes.

The circular-economy champion: Waste Connections (43)

Waste Connections is one of the largest waste-management companies in North America. In some markets, the company is now diverting as much as 70% of the waste it collects from landfills, and it has introduced new composting technology and better reporting tools to track diversion. With 23 landfill-gas generating facilities across its portfolio, it is also capturing and putting to good use a significant share of the methane produced by the rest of the waste – enough to power about 312,000 homes for a year. The company has invested in improving operational greenhouse gas emissions, deploying a fleet of 1,000 electric or compressed natural gas vehicles, and has introduced software to optimize routes for better fuel consumption. And its ambitions are larger still: last year, Waste Connections announced it would boost its recycling goal by 30% and committed $500 million to achieving its sustainability targets.

The transition torchbearer: Énergir (24)

It may seem strange to find Quebec’s largest natural gas company on a sustainability ranking, but the 24th-ranked Énergir has actually slipped several spots from last year’s 14th position. In this year’s rankings, Corporate Knights awarded the company a perfect sustainable revenue score despite only a modest increase in sustainable revenues between 2022 and 2024. Yow, the director of rankings, attributes the perfect score to increased revenues from renewable natural gas and wind projects. Énergir secured an ownership stake in one of Canada’s largest wind development projects in Seigneurie de Beaupré, invested in new biomethane infrastructure in Saint-Sophie and Saint-Flavien, and is also piloting a new green hydrogen project.

Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens for 2026

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The top three international performers this year are Schneider Electric SE (France), Tesla Inc. (USA) and Novo Nordisk A/S (Denmark), with overall sustainability scores of 72.69%, 69.79% and 68.46%, respectively. Schneider Electric was the top company on the 2025 Global 100 list. Apart from Tesla, two other U.S. firms made the cut: Cisco Systems, a multinational specializing in networking hardware, and HP Inc., a manufacturer of personal computers and printers. Technology and industrial firms dominate the list, with most linked to electrification and digital infrastructure. Unilever PLC, in eighth place, is the only traditional fast‑moving consumer goods company on this year’s list.

“Corporate investment is a major preoccupation in Canada today, but quality matters at least as much as quantity,” Corporate Knights’ CEO and co-founder Toby Heaps said in a statement. “Our Best 50 analysis shows that economy-wide, investment in sustainable activities is growing materially faster than its non-sustainable counterparts – and that’s one of the most important and encouraging economic signals we’ve seen.”

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2026 Best 50 Corporate Citizens methodology

Press release | Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens for 2026

Discover this year’s full list of Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens

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To answer these questions, the Corporate Knights research group assesses eligible companies and scores them using three equally weighted indicators:

1. The share of revenue from sustainable products and services
2. The share of investments directed toward sustainable projects
3. The sustainable revenue momentum, which is the compound annual growth rate in sustainable revenue from 2022 to 2024

Companies can also earn a bonus of up to 5% for linking CEO pay to sustainability targets. Additionally, they face deductions of up to 5% each for legal sanctions and workplace fatalities. Companies are benchmarked against industry peers across 64 groupings.

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Sustainable revenue momentum powers leading corporate citizenship

• Renewable power generators lead the 2026 ranking, with telecom, transit and forest products also represented in the top five spots.
• Methodology update focuses on sustainable investments and revenues, along with an urgency-driven sustainable-revenue momentum score.
• Publicly traded Best 50 Corporate Citizens again outperformed their peers financially, earning 798% gross return since the ranking launched in June 2002, versus 759% for the S&P/TSX Composite.

Toronto, June 23, 2026 — Two renewable power generators lead the 2026 Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada ranking, with seven different industries represented across the top 10. Innergex Renewable Energy Inc. reclaimed the number one position it last held in 2023, while Polaris Renewable Energy Inc. jumped from 12th place in 2025 to second this year. The telecom sector rounds out this year’s top three among the Best 50, with Telus Corp. taking third spot.

Longueuil, QC-based Innergex enjoys extensive access to “patient capital” following its recent acquisition and privatization — a critical attribute when focusing on long-term infrastructure buildout. With operations in four countries and across multiple forms of renewable generation, Innergex currently produces 4,424 megawatts of clean energy, with another 12,000 in the ready-to-bid stage.

Toronto-based Polaris has steadily expanded its presence across Latin America and the Caribbean, with a carbon-cutting portfolio that now includes hydroelectric projects in Peru and Ecuador, a geothermal plant in Nicaragua, solar fields in Panama and the Dominican Republic, and a wind farm in Puerto Rico.

Launched in 2002, this year’s Best 50 ranking is the 25th iteration. All Canadian corporations with at least $1 billion in annual revenues are assessed.¹ For 2026, the transparent and quantitative methodology was updated to focus on three equally weighted metrics: share of investments and share of revenues that are sustainable (as defined under the Corporate Knights Sustainable Economy Taxonomy), and the sustainable-revenue momentum score, which tracks growth in sustainable revenues from 2022 to 2024. There are 10 new entrants on this year’s Best 50 list.

Among the 2026 Best 50 companies, 46.3 per cent of investments were classified as sustainable, in comparison to only 6.0 per cent among all other companies assessed. For sustainable revenues, comparative performance was 39.2 per cent for the Best 50 companies and 6.0 per cent for all other companies assessed.

On an economy-wide basis, growth in sustainable investments and revenues continues to far outpace growth in non-sustainable activities. Among all companies assessed, total sustainable investments increased 60% from 2019 to 2024 (2024: $39 billion), while sustainable revenues jumped 61% (2024: $146 billion). That contrasts with growth in non-sustainable investments of 51% and in non-sustainable revenues of 39% over the same period.

This year’s Best 50 cohort demonstrates the even more impressive pace that is possible, with growth in sustainable investments of 79% from 2019 to 2024, and growth in sustainable revenues of 94%.

Troublingly, however, $39 billion in total sustainable investments was down from $43 billion in last year’s ranking and $41 billion the year prior. Even more notably, investment levels continue to fall far short of requirements, with Canada’s recently appointed Taxonomy and Transition Planning Council citing the climate investment gap alone at $115 billion annually.

Concurrently with the Best 50 ranking, Corporate Knights is also releasing its 2026 Top 10 International Corporate Citizens in Canada list. It includes the highest-scoring companies in the recent Global 100 Ranking of the world’s most sustainable companies with at least $1 billion in revenues in Canada. The top three international performers were Schneider Electric SE (France), Tesla Inc. (USA) and Novo Nordisk A/S (Denmark).

Quotes — Attributable to Corporate Knights CEO Toby Heaps

“For 25 years, Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens have set an impressive benchmark, demonstrating how to do business in a way that’s consistent with a healthy planet and society. With a recent compound annual growth rate in sustainable revenue of about 22%, they’re also laying the groundwork for the accelerated momentum we urgently need.”

“Corporate investment is a major preoccupation in Canada today, but quality matters at least as much as quantity. Our Best 50 analysis shows that economy-wide, investment in sustainable activities is growing materially faster than its non-sustainable counterparts – and that’s one of the most important and encouraging economic signals we’ve seen.”

A digital version of the ranking and further contextual and methodological information is available at corporateknights.com/rankings/best-50-rankings/2026-best-50/

Financial Returns: Best 50 vs. S&P/TSX Composite Index

On a total return basis, the stock market performance of the publicly traded Best 50 Corporate Citizens has outpaced that of its peers, earning 798% gross return since the launch of this ranking in June 2002, versus 759% for the S&P/TSX Composite.²

For interview requests and further information: kevin@kevinhanson.ca 416.219.1901

About Corporate Knights

Corporate Knights Inc. is an independent media and research company. Its media division publishes the award-winning sustainable-economy magazine Corporate Knights, circulated in The Globe and Mail, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Its research division produces sustainability rankings, research reports and financial product ratings based on corporate sustainability performance. Learn more at www.corporateknights.com.

Toby Heaps, CEO, Corporate Knights
toby@corporateknights.com 416.274.1432

¹ With some additional inclusions (e.g. largest credit unions by assets under management). 356 companies were eligible for the 2026 Best 50 ranking.

² Timeframe for comparison is June 1, 2002 to April 30, 2026, with market cap weightings rebalanced annually on June 1.

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