Toby Heaps: Some people think the Inflation Reduction Act was a spectacular success. There are other views as well. What’s your take? Did the policy work?

Jigar Shah: I’m sure everybody is right. I think that we all have to be honest about the fact that the United States had chosen to allow its manufacturing sector to dwindle in a very big and material way, right from 30% of gross domestic product down to about 10% of GDP. I don’t think that what we were doing under the Inflation Reduction Act was going to be solely responsible for changing that trajectory.

I have a lot of friends who are doing very large, audacious things in the cleantech space, and every single one of them, without exception, when they hit a certain milestone, decided to build their manufacturing facility or their first-of-a-kind plant in Asia. A few of them decided to go to Europe or to India or to South America. In general, not a single one of them thought Tennessee or Georgia or Texas was the right place to scale up their plant.

That all changed over the last four years. We got every one of them to consider the United States, and I’d say close to 70% of them ended up choosing the United States after evaluating all of the situations. So from that perspective, we have made a material difference.

TH: That’s encouraging. In Canada, the current government led by Prime Minister Mark Carney has introduced a pack of investment incentives that, through the capital expensing of 100% and tax rebates, amount to about 50 cents on the dollar. So if you invest in most clean-economy investments, you’ll get back half that money in the same year. Do you think that is going to be enough for Canada to become a magnet?

JS: I would suggest that this is not really about numbers. I think that ultimately this is about the animal spirits of the cleantech sector. So the question is, are CEOs looking to Canada to build a facility? And I think right now, the answer is no.

And I don’t think Canada’s ever reached out to them and asked them to come to Canada. And the thing that bothers me the most – not just about Canada, but the U.K. or EU, Australia – is that they believe that the policies themselves are enough to attract companies. And I’m like, no, you need to make some phone calls. You need to reach out proactively to the top 400 companies and say, “Have you looked at Canada? Can I keep you on the phone for 45 minutes and explain it to you? Can I introduce you to a front-door person that will guide you through the entire Canadian process and introduce you to all of the three-letter acronyms and help you find the right programs?”

I’m focused on people who have raised at least $200 million of corporate capital. We’re not talking about the long tail of companies that have raised a seed round. We’re talking about people who’ve been able to get all their milestones reached, and now they’re at a very clear inflection point where they need public policy to be able to get to the next level.

TH: A lot of coverage in Corporate Knights magazine has focused on how the private sector and private capital can turbocharge this energy revolution. Do you think it’s capitalist Kool-Aid, this idea that the private sector is going to make up the bulk of the capital that gets deployed? Or do we really need the public sector to pony up, like they are now for the military spending?

JS: It’s an ongoing argument. I don’t know that I am smart enough to know what the conclusion is, but if you look at the solar, battery storage, critical minerals, EV sector in China, I would say that at least 70% of all the capital that China has put into that sector has been completely and utterly wasted right now. You may say, well, look at what they got for it: they have all this commanding market share and all this other stuff, right? But they haven’t ever raised their prices to the point where the profits of the winners are paying off the losses of the losers. China has no home runs. The question is, do you want to copy that exactly in the United States or Canada? My sense is no. So what do you want to do that’s different?

What we did in the United States was we said we’re going to be private-sector-led, government-enabled. We said the private sector has to vote with the $200 million worth of cash that they’ve given these companies, and then we’re going to match them with public-sector dollars that they need to get to the next stage, to really be able to get their costs down. And that worked really well. I would say the losses out of the U.S. system from the Inflation Reduction Act have been remarkably low. Let’s say we awarded 100 projects. Maybe 40 of them have failed, but of those 40, we’ve released almost no money because they had to meet certain milestones to get the money.

TH: You’re someone who doesn’t just focus on what’s already here but imagines what could be possible. Let’s say we’re sitting in our rocking chairs in 2050. What’s the prize? What could things look like?

JS: Well, I think we already see it. The beauty of our space is that every single thing worth talking about takes 50 years. We started seeing cellphones in the 1970s, but the technology didn’t really become powerful until the iPhone came out in 2007. Solar panels are the same.

When you look at where we are today, we’re in a place where there was disruption in Pakistan, in Nepal, in Ethiopia, and instead of choosing to move to diesel fuel, the entire country chose to move to solar and battery storage. So now, 20% of the entire grid in Pakistan has been transformed in three years into solar power.

You see the same potential in Canada or in the United States. Balcony solar means that you buy the solar panel from Home Depot, you unbox it, and you just stick it on your balcony, and then you plug it into the outside wall socket. And it’s super cost-effective, even in places that don’t get as much sun.

Now the question becomes what else is going to be cool? It is very obvious that everyone is moving to electric vehicles. Whether it’s 10% a year, or 25% or 50% a year, they’re all moving to electric vehicles. If you have 40 gigawatts of batteries, which is what we have already in the United States, and then you end up with 400 gigawatts of batteries [with the addition of EVs], which we will have here in the next few years – that backs up the entire U.S. grid during the spring and the fall. What do you need to unlock that? Vehicle-to-grid technologies. Why do people want to install those technologies? Because 15% of U.S. households already have backup gas or diesel generators, so they’ve already voted with their pocketbooks to pay for that.

Now if you have a car, and that car is a 125-kilowatt-hour battery, you can back up your whole house with that car. And once it’s backed up that way, well, now the utility can send it a signal saying, “We’re going to pay you 30 cents a kilowatt-hour, because otherwise we’ll have rolling blackouts because the natural gas plant that we were counting on failed, and so we’d like to pay you to basically save the grid.”

We’re in this situation where that technology works today, and when we’re in our rocking chairs in 2050, everyone will have them. They will be ubiquitous. And our children will say, “Well, duh, like, obviously.”

TH: When I talk to older utility guys, they kind of roll their eyes at the vehicle-to-grid idea and say, “Okay, well, tell me where that’s actually happening.”

JS: It’s happening at complete scale in the United Kingdom. It’s at a point where Octopus Energy is giving people free power on a regular basis to charge their electric vehicles. Because there’s a lot of excess wind and solar during certain times of the day. Remember, 90% of everything we need to do with the grid with electric vehicles can be done with managed charging, what they call V1G. Then there’s another 8% of what can be done with vehicle-to-home, where you never export back into the grid, you just take the home off-grid. So we could get 98% of the value without updating any of our standards that are in place now.

The 2026 Global 100 list puts speed in the spotlight

TH: Do you think geopolitically, has China sort of got themselves in a dominant spot that’s going to be pretty significant for this next century?

JS: China has clearly overplayed their hand. I think they don’t know it yet, but they have. Xi Jinping has been in power too long. And now he’s pissed off everybody. He’s pissed off India, Turkey, Malaysia, Vietnam – anyone who manufactures stuff, he’s pissed off all of them. So now the question becomes how long can they continue to lose money?

Remember, we have many more iterations of technology that you and I know about. Like, solar panels are not done, right? We got perovskites and other things that are coming in. Electric vehicles are not done. We have technologies in the queue that’ll double the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. We have no reason to share any of that technology with China now.

So when we decide not to share that technology with them and instead share it with India or Mexico or other places, we’ll see where it goes. Yes, it’s going to take us a solid 10-year effort to actually diversify the supply chain, which is exactly how long it took after the Arab oil embargo for us to diversify the supply chains for oil. We know how to do it. It’s a playbook. We’re executing on it now, and I think in 10 years’ time, we’re going to be quite a bit more diverse.

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

The post How to scale up the green economy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The convergence of this moment and your leadership gives us a rare chance to break free from the status quo. We cannot let this golden opportunity to make Canada a beacon for the world slip through our fingers. 

Like a championship hockey team, Team Canada Inc. has all the right ingredients – talent, capital and resources – to win big on the global stage. 

As Canada’s head coach, we’re counting on you to channel the wisdom and boldness of our hockey legends, making the tough calls so we can finally deliver on Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s century-old promise that the 20th century would be the century of Canada. That can be true for the century we’re in now, if we avoid getting stuck in the past with outdated technology. 

Where do we play? Fossil fuels are fading, even as their lobbyists grow louder, while clean industries — renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, clean AI, electrification and modular construction – are rising with unstoppable momentum.

In electro-economics, the more you build, the cheaper it gets; in petro-economics, the more you extract, the higher the cost. Do we invest in the future or cling to the past? Like the Great One, we need to skate to where the puck is going. 

Who do we play with? Will we keep relying on a single, increasingly unreliable trading partner for three-quarters of our exports? Or will we reach for opportunity by diversifying with traditional allies and markets like China and India, where nearly 40% of global growth will occur by 2050? It’s time for some bold deal-making to set up more productive games with our rivals in the spirit of Alan Eagleson’s 1972 hockey Summit Series between Canada and the Soviet Union. 

Who owns Team Canada Inc.? Do we settle for branch-plant status and domestic oligopolies, or do we become masters in our own house – with an inclusive wealth fund, stronger support for co-ops and employee ownership, and a strategy to scale Canadian champions? Denmark, with just six million people, is home to global leaders in cleantech, shipping, beer and pharma. We’re not too small or too poor – our AAA credit rating and $14 trillion in institutional capital say otherwise. Let’s play with our elbows up like the legendary Gordie Howe. 

How do we stop scoring on ourselves? Our slow-moving bureaucracy and risk aversion have stalled $89 billion in clean economy funds and cost us billions more in trade barriers, red tape, wildfires and fragmented energy systems. It’s time to move fast, break the right things and unite as one economy – not 13 – while ensuring that Indigenous communities have real equity in our future. We can’t afford to put Steve Smith (who scored the most infamous goal on his own net in the 1986 Smythe Division final) on the ice.  

How do we keep our skills sharp? Denmark invests 1.7% of GDP in active labour market policies – six times more than Canada – helping workers retool for the jobs of tomorrow. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development puts us near the bottom of advanced economies. Are we ready to invest in our people and win, just as Scotty Bowman always did with his teams? 

Let’s seize this chance and play to win – because the 21st century can still be Canada’s century, if we have the courage to skate hard to where the puck is going, pass boldly and shoot for the stars.

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

The post Publisher’s Note: Canada needs to play to win appeared first on Corporate Knights.

My university classmate and tennis nemesis Paul Fengler and I decided there had to be a better way. As we wrote in our first editor’s note on the release of our inaugural Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada, “Corporations don’t exist in a vacuum: we as citizens are their lifeblood. Our ignorance and complacency does not grant permission to corporations to destroy the world – it necessitates it.”

We joked that our legal budget didn’t permit a ranking of the worst companies in Canada, so we took a stab at tracking down the best. Thus was born the Corporate Knights project to annually rank the top 50 corporate citizens in Canada with the aim to lay out in one clear page the Canadian firms that were part of the solution.

We noted that “for many companies, practising corporate social responsibility (CSR) is less about substance than it is about public relations.” Being a good company was about little more than charitable donations. Our chosen task of ranking companies was a tough job when so few were transparent about their social and environmental performance. We used our new platform to urge corporations that are “serious about being good citizens to have their social and environmental performance evaluated by standardized procedures and audited by a third party – just like financial statements.”

How did Corporate Canada fare in that first annual ranking of the Corporate Knights Best 50? Our evaluation: “Far from a sunny day, but there is much to commend that suggests that the clouds may be parting.”

Twenty years into this experiment, a lot has changed. Exxon, once the most valuable company in the world, has seen its value cut in half and was recently humiliated by its shareholders, who took the extraordinary step of imposing three clean-energy activists on its 12-person board of directors. Sustainability accounting is still a wild west, but the IFRS Foundation, which defines the language businesses report by, is on the cusp of launching an International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) to develop global standards for reporting on environmental, social and governance (ESG) matters.

By far the biggest sea change has been the culture shift.

The organizations that set the mind-maps for how power and money flow (including the powerful Business Roundtable of CEOs and the World Economic Forum) have updated their norms and formally adopted our credo of stakeholder capitalism, in word if not yet fully in deed.

Rather than the lowest-common-denominator approach of traditional business lobbies, groups of like-minded businesses (like the Council for Clean Capitalism, which Corporate Knights acts as secretariat to) are joining forces to actively shape policies for a clean and fair future.

Beyond the accounting profession, the major standard-setting bodies that define the playing field for capitalism’s top honchos (banks, investors, insurance providers and financial analysts) are edging out of their comfort zone of snail-like incrementalism to fully embrace the power of business as a force for good (something we called for in a paper written for the UN in 2017).

Though it’s in our nature to procrastinate, we are an adaptive species when survival is at stake.

The players that control the loot are taking note. Earlier this year, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), chaired by Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, united more than 160 firms (together responsible for assets in excess of US$70 trillion) committed to aligning their balance sheets with the world’s carbon budget.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that our emissions of heat-trapping gases are still going up, the oceans are filling with plastic, and our arable land is being increasingly desertified.

Is this a case of “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”? I don’t think so. Even though it’s in our nature to procrastinate, we are an adaptive species when survival is at stake.

The kindling for a new and cleaner capitalism has been laid by the people-power movements embodied by Greta Thunberg (who was in the womb when the first issue of Corporate Knights came out), a majority of national governments lining up behind net-zero emissions targets, and the limitless human ingenuity that has created solutions to bring humanity back into balance with nature.

The spark is the pandemic, which exposed the brittleness of our current system, as well as our immense power to solve big problems when we flex our collective muscle. The oxygen accelerant is the $400 trillion in global financial assets we have amassed.

Carney estimates that the difference between setting our planet on fire and a clean economy comes down to whether we can direct an additional 0.5% of this money pile each year to climate solutions, which is three times more than we currently are doing. Doing so would make a lot of sense, now that the economic solutions to solve the climate crisis are growing faster than the problems.

The more that businesses and investors see this opportunity through the clouds of outdated mindsets, the sooner we will get to a clean and fair economy.

Toby Heaps is the co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights.

The post Editor’s Note: Time for business to lead us to sunnier days appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The plan, put forward by the Council for Clean Capitalism, calls for the federal government to invest $50 billion per year over six years in key sectors: buildings, transportation, electricity, heavy industry, and oil and gas.

It came in the waning days of a federal election campaign in which the climate crisis has been a central issue, and in which all leading parties have pledged to take action to reduce emissions, though with vast difference in terms of policy ambition.

The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity represents the kind of government efforts that are typically employed only in time of a major war or economic crisis, and its proponents argue that such an economy-wide intervention is precisely what is required to prepare Canada for the rapid transition to a low-carbon economy that will be essential to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

Under the council’s proposal, grants would be made available to oil and gas and heavy industry companies that could guarantee that the investments would result in a 50% reduction in either greenhouse gas emissions or energy use in the targeted operations. Similarly, developers and contractors would receive grants for zero-carbon-ready buildings, whether through new construction or retrofits, while fleet operators, including transit authorities, would receive grants to cover the incremental costs of upgrading new vehicle purchases to be zero-emissions vehicles (ZEV). Funds would also be made available to cover the full cost of interprovincial high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) power lines.

The council argues that the increased debt incurred by Ottawa would be offset by massive job creation and higher tax revenues that would result from the increased business activity.

All told, the investment effort would reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 139 megatonnes annually by 2025, taking Canada 70% of the way to its Paris treaty commitment, according to modelling done by Corporate Knights, an affiliate of the Council for Clean Capitalism. Under the Paris Agreement, Canada committed to reduce emissions to 30% below 2005 levels by 2030 and is now being urged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be even more ambitious.

The GHG reductions would be in addition to the impact of measures adopted by federal and provincial governments over the past four years, which Environment Canada has projected would leave Canada some 78 megatonnes above its target of 513 megatonnes in 2030.

“The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity demonstrates that transitioning to a low-carbon economy is less about ‘shutting down’ than it is about retooling, diversifying and growing,” said council coordinator Toby Heaps, who is also the publisher of Corporate Knights magazine. He added that the investment benefits are especially significant in the oil sector, “which offers the biggest carbon savings bang for buck, and where production costs per barrel will be critical to remaining competitive.” The plan estimates that an investment of $21 billion over six years would reduce GHGs by 30 megatonnes per year by 2025, saving the sector $10 billion in energy costs over the same time frame.

The members of the Council for Clean Capitalism include Teck Resources, HP Canada, Sun Life Financial Canada, BGIS (formerly Brookfield’s real estate management arm) and BASF Canada. Corporate Knights did the economic modelling for the capital plan.

Any effort to implement such a plan would run into significant challenges. It would add $300 billion to the federal debt over six years, represent a massive government intervention in the economy, and effectively subsidize the country’s oil and gas producers despite calls from clean energy advocates to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.

However, when outlining the plan for the council, Heaps said that the urgent nature of the climate crisis justifies an unprecedented response from government.

“Stimulus of this scale would be justified by the economic benefits that accrue from a once-in-a-generation energy transition and by the need to respond to the climate emergency,” he said.

The plan would add $50 billion annually to the federal deficit for six years – roughly 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) – and drive the federal debt-to-GDP ratio up by 10 percentage points, to 44%. The Conservative government under Stephen Harper posted a deficit of $55.6 billion in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009/10, or 3.4% of GDP, but cut the shortfall in half within two years.

“Stimulus of this scale would be justified by the economic benefits that accrue from a once-in-a-generation energy transition and by the need to respond to the climate emergency.”

A recent Scotiabank report suggested that the federal government should be prepared to inject as much as $100 billion of stimulus, or 4% of GDP, into the economy if the global economy stalls as expected.

Heaps acknowledges that it would be challenging to justify a plan that essentially pays corporate Canada to make the reductions that climate crisis advocates argue companies should be doing on their own. However, such investments would pay enormous dividends by preparing the Canadian economy for a low-carbon future, boosting economic activity and jobs, and achieving dramatic reductions in GHG emissions, he said in an interview.

Canada’s response to the looming climate emergency has been a key issue in the election campaign that resulted in a Liberal minority government.

The Conservatives have campaigned against a carbon tax and have offered only modest alternatives, including a two-year subsidy for home renovations, to reduce emissions.

The Green Party occupies the other end of the spectrum from the Conservatives, with ambitious plans for retrofitting buildings, prohibiting the sale of gasoline- or diesel-powered automobiles by 2030 and stopping approvals for new oil and gas projects and slowly decreasing existing operations.

Liberal leader Justin Trudeau has promised to exceed Canada’s 2030 emissions target, but the party has not laid out a clear path to do so. The Liberals point to existing commitments that include major multiyear spending for green infrastructure such as public transit while offering, for example, a new policy of home energy retrofit loans to be financed by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

The New Democrats – who may hold a balance of power in a minority government after the election – and the Green Party have both campaigned on a pledge to end subsidies and tax breaks for the oil and gas sector. The plan by the Council for Clean Capitalism would, in contrast, provide the industry – and the oil sands sector in particular – with annual multibillion-dollar subsidies over the next six years.

The Council for Clean Capitalism plan would allocate $21 billion to oil and gas companies to invest in technology that reduces their emissions. Heaps said that the oil industry offers the biggest GHG reductions per dollar invested of any sector and must be part of the solution if Canada is to have a shot at meeting its 2030 emission reduction goals.

The industry, which accounted for 27% of Canada’s emissions in 2017, is already spending more than $1 billion annually on efforts that reduce GHGs. However, it is typically only pursuing operational changes that improve energy efficiency and yield attractive rates of return due to lower operating costs. Suncor Energy, for example, announced last month that it will invest $1.4 billion to replace two coke-fired boilers with natural-gas-fired co-generation units that will produce steam for its oil sands operations near Fort McMurray and provide 800 megawatts of power for the grid. The system will reduce GHGs from steam production at the site by 25% (or 2.5 megatonnes per year) while providing a “robust” rate of return to be a “significant contributor to the company’s goal of growing incremental free funds flow by $2 billion by 2023,” the company said.

Oil industry veteran Gord Lambert said there are significant opportunities to reduce emissions throughout the industry, from the extraction of bitumen to the refining of crude into petroleum products, but companies need to see reasonable payback before making the spending commitments. “Lots of ideas are available to the sector, but the [lengthy] time-to-payout is making investment difficult,” said Lambert, a Suncor retiree who now serves as CEO of Alberta’s energy regulator and as a board member at Alberta Innovates, a provincial agency that provides financial support for innovation.

The province helps finance technological innovation with revenues generated by a provincial carbon levy that was first put in place by a Conservative government and was increased by the New Democrats after they took power in 2015. However, environmental campaigners argue the federal government should not be subsidizing the oil industry, even if such spending reduces emissions per barrel. “We need to get off oil, not reduce upstream emissions per barrel,” Greenpeace campaigner Keith Stewart said. “Public funds should be focused on a wholesale transition off fossil fuels.”

Perhaps a less politically divisive area of focus in the capital plan is its call for investment in energy efficiency and electrification in the buildings and transport sectors, which together account for over a third of the country’s emissions.

Each of the national parties has some form of energy retrofit policy in their platform, ranging from a refundable tax credit worth up to $3,800 offered by the Conservatives to an ambitious plan to retrofit every building in the country by 2030 put forward by the Greens.

The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity urges Ottawa to allocate $78 billion over six years to cover the incremental costs of making new buildings zero-carbon ready and to retrofit buildings in Canada. It estimates that the industry is prepared to invest $795 billion between 2020 and 2025, and the incremental 10% provided by Ottawa to cover costs of upgrades to new buildings and retrofits would be enough to bring a quarter of all commercial and residential buildings to a zero-carbon-ready standard by the end of 2025. (Zero-carbon ready suggests a property owner can reduce a building’s energy consumption to the point that any emissions from fossil fuels are offset by onsite renewable energy.)

The investment in the building sector would provide the largest boost to economic growth, the council said. The investment program would also lower costs for building owners, whether commercial developers or homeowners, and generate tax revenues for government to help offset the spending.

The targets for building retrofits (3% of total building stock per year) are consistent with the most aggressive plans seen in Europe and in U.S. states like New York and Connecticut, said Brendan Haley, policy director for Ottawa-based advocacy group Efficiency Canada.

However, there is a stubborn resistance among builders and owners to adopt the off-the-shelf technology available to dramatically reduce energy consumption in buildings. Energy efficiency technologies can require significant upfront costs that are only recouped over time. There are also barriers such as the need for management time and attention to decide what technologies to embrace, the reluctance of building operators to incorporate new systems, and the tendency of business executives to want to invest in revenue-generating assets rather than cost-saving operational changes. Those hurdles could be effectively overcome through the provision of “free money” from the federal government that would generate broad economic and environmental benefits for the country, Haley said.

The Capital Plan for Clean Prosperity represents a radical departure for a country that has long struggled to meet its climate commitments and has battled over carbon taxes and the fate of oil pipelines. It also represents an opportunity for whatever party is in power after the Oct. 21 election to demonstrate a vision on the climate crisis that goes beyond “business as usual.”

Shawn McCarthy is an independent writer and senior counsel with Sussex Strategy Group.

The post Council urges new Parliament to take on massive climate investment plan appeared first on Corporate Knights.

For better or worse, Canada’s business community is both risk-averse and generally skeptical of new regulatory actions. The safest bet for the average company is to stay silent on controversial policies like carbon pricing, even if there’s internal support for it. But the private sector is also home to smart and innovative leadership that is demonstrating remarkable foresight on issues related to sustainability. To push Canada towards a low-carbon future, private sector leadership will be needed to spur governments into action, and vice versa.

We’ve begun to see a new dynamic play out over the past year across Canada. In Metro Vancouver, major business groups worked hard in support of the failed Yes side for the transit plebiscite.

Over 160 B.C. businesses signed an open letter calling on the provincial government to strengthen the province’s carbon tax, while major oil sands producers joined Alberta Premier Rachel Notley on stage for her climate policy announcement last November. The Mining Association of Canada recently endorsed the federal government’s efforts to establish a national carbon price.

The Council for Clean Capitalism takes this a step further by placing CEOs at the head of a group advocating for the integration of clean capitalism principles into broader economic and social policy.

Companies are grappling with how to shift their business models internally towards an economic model in which what is good for business is also good for the environment and society. Economist and author Jeremy Rifkin counselled companies at an event in Toronto earlier this year “to be in two business models simultaneously for the next three decades.” Many companies, including energy powerhouses Suncor and Enbridge, are working hard to bridge this gap to a cleaner future.

Another example of business pursuing this dual focus is the B.C.-based financial co-operative Vancity, the top-ranked company in the 2016 Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada ranking. The company has worked hard to remake itself as a different kind of financial institution, one that places values-based or ethical banking at the heart of its business model (see here for a full profile).

Following Vancity on the list is WestJet, a leader in the airline industry on resource productivity and taxes paid. Third place went to the Co-operators group, the insurance provider and perennial contender that finished first in 2011. It performed particularly well on its pension and tax scores, and maintained one of the lowest CEO to average worker pay ratios among the Best 50.

A deeper dive into the indicators turned up a mixed bag when it came to benchmarking any improvements in disclosure practices. All but two companies on the 2016 Best 50 released their energy and carbon productivity, with slight disclosure increases occurring around water and waste productivity as well. The CEO to average worker pay ratio fell to 73:1 from 88:1 in 2015, whereas the amount of tax paid increased three points to 14 per cent.

One troubling finding was a significant decline in innovation capacity from 0.97 per cent in 2015 to 0.55 per cent in 2016. R&D expenditure is measured as a percentage of revenue, trailing over the past three years. Diversity levels, meanwhile, stayed stagnant. Slightly better board diversity scores were offset by lower levels of diversity among senior management.

As Rifkin said, this shift to a cleaner form of capitalism will remain a work in progress for decades to come. The companies on this year’s Best 50 are setting themselves up to flourish in this changing environment.

Click here to go back to the ranking landing page.

The post Looking to leadership from corporate Canada appeared first on Corporate Knights.