But some scientists and medical professionals are crying foul. The animals that are being used as laboratory test subjects in the search for COVID-19 therapeutics might be hindering, rather than helping, the race, they say. The virulence and highly contagious nature of COVID-19 is demanding a new model of research that bypasses animals, instead using human-biology-based testing. A growing number of scientists suggest that accelerated COVID-19 research is exposing animal modelling for what many have long claimed it to be: a scientific anachronism.

Dr. Thomas Hartung is the director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), a laboratory for developmental neurotoxicity research based on genomics and metabolomics at Johns Hopkins University. Hartung points to the slow trajectory of drug and vaccine development using animal modelling. Conventional drug development relies heavily on animal testing to understand the molecular mechanisms of disease and potential treatments, helping to explain why it takes more than 10 years to get a medication to market, while vaccines typically take 12 years, says Hartung. Such lengthy timelines translate into a hefty medical bill: roughly $2 billion per drug. With COVID-19, “we cannot wait that long for treatments,” says Hartung, who spoke to online delegates at the 11th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences in August. “We have to be faster than we were in the past.”

Equally problematic, if not even more eyebrow raising: 95% of new drugs that enter clinical trials don’t make it to the market, according to the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). In other words, the vast majority of new drugs fail once they move into human studies, despite appearing safe and effective in experiments with animals.

In science, as in other areas, necessity is the mother of invention. The rapid acceleration of innovations like three-dimensional human organs on a microchip are being refined. These living organoids are accelerating the development of effective medical advancements for the many virulent maladies afflicting humans, including, most urgently of course, COVID-19.

Hartung, highly regarded in the field of animal-testing alternatives, pioneered a patent on brain organoids, which are tissue cultures made from human stem cells that simulate the human organ. Developed four years ago, mini brains, which can be mass-produced, have been used to study infections caused by viruses such as HIV, dengue and Zika. This past spring, Hartung and his team proved that SARS-CoV-2 can infect and damage human brain cells by testing about 800 mini brains – each the size of a house-fly eye – that were “identical in composition” to the human organ. Observing evidence-based effects of COVID-19 in the human brain will help researchers jumpstart important therapeutics and medical care. “It will be difficult not to use them in a similar, fast way for drug and vaccine development and regulation in the future,” Hartung says.

The vast majority of new drugs fail once they move to human trials, despite appearing safe and effective in animal experiments.

Hartung points to other uses of organs on a microchip, such as human lung organoids that breathe. This past April, researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering reported that human-lung airway chips demonstrated that two drugs, amodiaquine and toremifene, significantly inhibited entry of the COVID-19 virus into the human body. Such models are proving effective for quality assurance and demonstrating that a drug is therapeutically effective, helping researchers leapfrog over animal modelling. Additional benefits include toxicity testing of newly developed drugs, giving more accurate results at a lower cost, Hartung adds. Such micro physiological systems have become so well established, he says, that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would reduce mammal testing by 30% by 2025 and phase it out entirely by 2035.

Micro human organs aren’t the only scientific advances pushing animal modelling to the side. Sophisticated computer modelling has already begun to replace standard safety practices for chemicals, such as dropping compounds into rabbits’ eyes or feeding substances to rats to establish lethal doses. IEEE Spectrum recently reported that the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee had crunched data on more than 40,000 human genes and analyzed 2.5 billion genetic combinations to try to determine COVID-19 therapeutics. Summit found a pattern of gene activity in the lungs of COVID-19 patients, which helped identify a pathology that physicians knew would respond to certain existing drugs.

Increasingly, pharmaceutical companies are starting to use alternative models to reduce the animals they use in research. This past spring, Pfizer, in collaboration with German biotechnology company BioNTech, announced it was jumpstarting development of a COVID-19 vaccination in an initiative titled Project Lightspeed. Using BioNTech’s proprietary messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, four different vaccine versions were tested in human clinical trials, which eliminated years of waiting for results from animal modelling. Pfizer spokesperson Jessica Smith stated in an email that traditional animal model studies are also being incorporated into the company’s research. Ultimately, one vaccine, BNT162b2, was selected for further testing. The vaccine may be available in Canada in 2021, pending Health Canada approval. If it proves safe, the American government has already committed to purchasing nearly $2-billion worth for 100 million doses.

Biotechnology company Moderna, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is also using mRNA technology in collaboration with the NIH to test a COVID-19 vaccine on humans. The company initially tried the vaccine, called mRNA-1273, on animal models before launching human trials but was able to jump to the first phase of human trials at “record speed,” noted the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is funding the trials. Moderna has received close to US$1 billion in government funding for vaccine development, as well as a purchase order of US$1.53 billion for 100 million doses, if approved.

Canadian scientists are also working to accelerate the shift away from animal modelling. In Quebec City, biopharmaceutical company Medicago is researching a plant-derived vaccine for COVID-19, in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline. Medicago uses virus-like particles, or VLPs, that mimic the shape and dimensions of a virus, allowing the body to recognize the invader and create an immune response. It started phase-one human trials this summer.

Paradigm shifters

One proponent hoping to see a paradigm shift in which human biology serves as the gold standard in scientific research is Dr. Charu Chandrasekera, the executive director and founder of the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods (CCAAM) at the University of Windsor in Ontario, as well as its subsidiary, the Canadian Centre for the Validation of Alternative Methods (CaCVAM). CCAAM’s aim, Chandrasekera says, is to promote the replacement of animals in Canadian biomedical research, education and regulatory testing.

Chandrasekera recalls her journey from young researcher at an American Midwestern university, investigating the molecular mechanisms of heart failure and diabetes using mice and rats. It eventually became clear, she says, that the studies “didn’t enhance our understanding of human heart disease, nor accelerate therapeutic development for humans, making the rodent studies scientifically futile and ethically unjustifiable. I realized that none of the work I was doing was going to help humans.”

Today, Chandrasekera continues her diabetes research by using alternatives like 3D bioprinted human tissue, including liver, lung, intestine, pancreas, skeletal muscle and blood-brain-barrier. Tissue for testing can be obtained from either live or deceased human organs, preserved and manipulated to ensure they can divide indefinitely, Chandrasekera says. Or, human skin can be biopsied and stem cells harvested, creating brain, heart, liver and pancreas organ cells. “You use these cell models to test drugs and chemicals,” she says.

Despite such advances, animal modelling is still regarded as the gold standard of research and is required for regulatory approval from Health Canada. The federal department demands that researchers use animals when testing the safety of chemicals found in food and household items, pharmaceuticals or medical equipment.

Canada (and the U.S.) also allows the use of animals for testing cosmetics, even though the practice has been banned in the U.K. since 1998. The European Union banned cosmetic testing on animals in 2013 but modified the legislation this past summer to allow for a handful of exceptions.

Toronto-based lawyer Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, says that Canada needs to create a federal animal-protection act with government oversight. Currently, scrutiny of lab-animal welfare lies with the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC), which assesses and verifies institutional animal ethics and care programs under its Good Animal Practice certification program. CCAC certification is required for all institutions that receive public funding to undertake animal-based projects. However, private labs can opt out of CCAC’s voluntary certification system. “There’s almost no ability for anyone to get a glimpse into what’s happening” in private labs, says Labchuk, adding that it isn’t even known how many animals are kept in such facilities. “We think that’s unacceptable in 2020 that people can use animals in pretty horrific ways in private without any government or public oversight.” (About four million animals, 40% of them mice, are used each year in public labs for research, education and regulatory testing in Canada.)

“We’re facing this wicked problem of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we can’t afford to be lazy about using antiquated methods in our pharmaceutical research.”
– Dr. Lisa Kramer,
University of Toronto

Labchuk, Chandrasekera and Dr. Lisa Kramer, a professor of finance at the University of Toronto, are part of a working group planning to lobby federal legislators in Canada to invoke greater protections for lab animals. Kramer recommends that funders withdraw support from projects that are using animal testing that show no clear benefit to humans. Continued reliance on animal modelling in biomedical research not only slows down research but poses potential financial risks for pharmaceutical companies, their investors “and for society overall,” she says. “We’re facing this wicked problem of the COVID-19 pandemic, and we can’t afford to be lazy about using antiquated methods in our pharmaceutical research.” It shortchanges not only the medical professionals and students who work with patients, but taxpayers who underwrite research at publicly funded institutions, she adds.

Using non-animal modalities can save money, says Chandrasekera, pointing to a test that assesses how a chemical, once ingested, affects a person’s sensitivity to sunlight, called dermal phototoxicity. Animal modelling, requiring hundreds of rats, costs $11,500 per chemical. The alternative, approved by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Guidelines for the Testing of Chemicals program, is an in vitro (conducted in a test tube or Petri dish) cell-based test that costs $1,300, Chandrasekera says.

Public pressure is key to a decline in animal modelling. The cosmetic industry bowed to public pressure; will other sectors bow too? A private lab in Cheshire, England, called XCellR8 thinks so. Founded in 2008 by Dr. Carol Treasure and Bushra Sim, XCellR8 is striving to “accelerate the world’s transition to animal-free testing,” says Susie Lee-Kilgariff, the company’s marketing director. In 2013, after the EU banned cosmetic testing on animals, XCellR8’s animal-free testing methodologies were suddenly in high demand. Today, clients of XCellR8 include numerous multinationals, such as beauty giants The Body Shop and Lush. Clients have embraced ethical approaches to product testing simply as a part of doing business. It also means they can claim to uphold “vegan supply chains,” with customers assured that they are buying vegan products, Lee-Kilgariff says. With ethical consumerism an ever-growing trend, other businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, that can lay claim to “cruelty-free” therapeutics will have an advantage in the marketplace of the future.

The grim battle against COVID-19 is accelerating the emergence of a new frontier in science. Increasingly, this means looking at alternatives to animal modelling to accelerate therapeutics that will save millions of people from death and sickness. Such advancements will also save the millions of creatures who have long been science’s unwilling servants and victims. As Chandrasekera says, “I would really like to see a scientific culture where human biology is the gold standard, where we all work together to advance science and medicine without harming animals.”

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and documentary filmmaker.

The post Of mice and men: Could COVID spell the end of animal testing?   appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Siegel’s expertise is in healthy buildings, and he is cross-appointed to U of T’s public health faculty. He points out that ventilation systems, which consume a lot of energy, tend to be neglected, particularly in institutional buildings, like schools.

But the COVID-19 pandemic has flipped this story on its head, especially when children, teens and teachers began venturing back into schools in the fall. Suddenly, robust ventilation systems that bring fresh air into schools are regarded as a critical defence – along with masks and social distancing – against the airborne transmission of the coronavirus.

The question, of course, is how to improve those systems. In most public boards, the portfolio of schools is extremely diverse, in size, shape, upkeep, age, traffic levels and so on. Some are newer and well designed, and others are old and neglected. For many institutions, air quality was low on the list of capital priorities pre-COVID. What’s more, adequate ventilation depends on many factors, from whether the windows open to the custodian’s skills in maintaining the mechanical systems. “The right answer,” says Siegel, “is ventilating better, not ventilating more.”

The most straightforward way to heed that advice is to change some basic operational practices. At Canada’s largest public board, for example, facilities officials have come up with a series of practical moves to boost the circulation of fresh air: starting exhaust fans two hours before school and running them for longer after the kids leave, as well as cleaning and replacing filters and air-supply grates more frequently. “If mechanical ventilation is not available,” says Toronto District School Board spokesperson Ryan Bird, “[we will] open windows to provide outdoor air.”

Tye Farrow, a Toronto architect who specializes in healthy buildings, has recommended a more aggressive set of fixes to his school clients, which tend to be independent academies. Several of the changes are based on the measures hospitals use to contain airborne disease transmission. These include installing ultraviolet-C lighting, a disinfectant, and MERV-13 filters; accelerating the circulation of fresh air; and employing what Farrow describes as the “submarine” approach to indoor space – that is, segmenting buildings into “bubbles” to limit the spread of the virus.

He also has urged school clients to invest in so-called bipolar ionization systems, which are magnetic devices installed in the HVAC system. They add a small charge to air passing through the ducts. The charge, he explains, causes microscopic particles to bind to larger airborne particles that will, in turn, be trapped by the MERV-13 filters. “We’ve advised all our clients to put it in their systems,” he says, adding that many began planning mitigation measures in the spring.

Many other building owners have taken similar steps. Property management firms for months have been making significant investments in heavy-duty air filters and the ionization systems for clients that range from office building landlords to movie theatre operators, according to a July report from Bloomberg, which noted that HVAC giants like Honeywell and Carrier have seen a surge in demand.

Yet Siegel is skeptical about some manufacturers’ claims about the virus-catching and -killing properties of these devices. “[Bipolar ionization] has been available for decades,” he says. “Why are there no independent high-quality journal articles on them? A reasonable guess is that the manufacturers don’t want to pay for this research because they already know the answer – they don’t really work.”

Farrow, however, adds another layer: when he’s checked in with school clients that have taken steps to improve ventilation, they tell him the students and staff seem relaxed and happy to be back, amidst the more general sense of unease in the public system. While private schools clearly have more resources to invest in altering the indoor environment, Farrow points out that mental-health and stress-related disorders, now increasingly common, are actually part of the pandemic, not just a byproduct of it. Indeed, besides the changes in air quality, he observes that school settings generally can either stoke or mitigate all that ambient anxiety.

There is, in fact, a body of emerging research about the relationship between design, health, mental health and even academic performance. Anyone who’s had to labour through a long afternoon meeting or a dull lecture in a dreary and airless breakout room or classroom understands the connection.

In the other direction, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory literature review noted that increased ventilation was linked to reduced prevalence of respiratory disease and student absenteeism, for example. And a 2014 University of New South Wales study found improved test scores in a Texas school district that had made investments to improve indoor air quality.

Others have focused on the educational and psychological benefits to students in classrooms of natural light, fresh air, non-linear shapes and natural materials, especially wood. Patrick Chouinard, CEO of Element5, an Ontario-based engineered wood manufacturer, points to the growing number of schools in Europe and the U.K. that make extensive use of cross-laminated timber and glulam (an abbreviation of “glued laminated timber”) wooden beams. He’s not a disinterested observer, of course, but few would argue that drywall or concrete block walls are preferable. “The advantage of wood is the natural human connection to the material,” he says. “Why are we not building our schools in Canada that way?” (Farrow’s educational clients are making such design choices, but they tend to be situated in independent or private schools.)

For Jeffrey Siegel, who has advocated for improved regulations and standards on indoor air quality, the pandemic presents an important opportunity to build healthier and better school buildings. As he puts it, “This is definitely a moment.”

The post The push to pump fresh air into schools appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In the pandemic, sick leave emerged early as a fault line. In Canada and the United States, paid sick leave is essentially an executive perk: there is no national right to paid sick leave, although some U.S. states have established their own paid-leave policies. In May, the Toronto-based Workers’ Action Centre called on the federal government to require 10 days of statutory paid sick leave for businesses across Canada. Later that month, Ottawa started just such a dialogue with the provinces, which hold jurisdiction over labour standards.  

A new study conducted by Corporate Knights shows the need for sick leave is urgent. After researching more than 850 publicly traded companies in 43 countries, CK’s researchers concluded that 31 of those countries, mainly in Europe, provide sufficient sick-leave policies (generally defined as offering at least 10 days’ paid leave). Canada, the U.S., South Korea and Ireland were among the 12 countries whose sick-leave policies were judged insufficient. 

In Canada, 28% of the companies studied were judged to offer sufficient paid-leave policies. In the U.S., that figure was just 18%. 

The report says white-collar industries are the most likely to offer sick leave. The highest incidence was found in technology companies, 39% of whom offer sufficient paid-sick leave. Runners-up were health care (31%), communications (29%), and financials (28%). The stragglers include industrial companies, consumer products and services, and materials suppliers. 

Even the pandemic didn’t change things much. According to the survey, just 10.4% of companies upgraded their paid sick-leave policies in their home country for COVID-19. Canada led the charge in this category, with 15% of local companies implementing COVID-related leave policies. The U.K. came a close second, with 14.8%, followed by the U.S. (12.6%) and Japan (12.5%).

Why does all this matter? According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 24% of civilian workers, or 33.6 million Americans, do not have paid sick leave. Moreover, 92% of high-earning employees can access paid sick leave, compared to just 31% of the lowest-paid employees. These lower-paid workers, of course, are the ones whose livelihoods are most at risk if they fall ill. And as they work disproportionately in the retail, fast food and manual-labour markets, these workers are very likely to infect others if they choose not to stay home.

Paid leave is good business. A 2017 study in the Journal of Public Economics showed that when U.S. cities mandated paid sick leave for workers, they experienced up to 40% declines in seasonal flu rates. Another 2017 study found that providing paid sick leave could have saved American employers up to $1.9 billion a year in reduced absenteeism from influenza-related diseases. In the age of COVID, the benefits of paid sick leave matter more than ever.

Read the full report here. For inquiries about acquiring full datasets, please contact research@corporateknights.com.

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth.

The post 2/3 of Canadian companies offer no paid sick leave appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The coronavirus is a whole different beast. Within 30 days of the first recorded death in Canada  (an 83-year-old man at North Vancouver’s Lynn Valley Care Centre on March 9), the federal government rolled out direct new spending of $105 billion to deal with the immediate fallout from shutting down vast parts of the economy in an attempt to contain the virus.

Just the $71 billion emergency wage subsidy to get Canadians through the next few months was more than the entire $70 billion the federal government had earmarked to address the climate emergency over the next 10 years – an amount that many considered bountiful just a few months ago.

The difference is the new coronavirus threatens all of our families today, whereas the climate crisis is more of a distant danger  – unless you live in growing wildfire, flood, heat wave, hurricane or drought  zones.

The human tendency to procrastinate is strong, but when the bell tolls, our survival instincts kick in.

Historic job losses triggered by the pandemic, combined with collapsing oil prices, will plunge every province in Canada into recession this year, according to RBC forecasts. As the conversation starts to shift from crisis relief to economic recovery, Canada has an opportunity to recover stronger than ever.

While in the past it has been difficult to make bold moves that would allow Canada to surf the clean economy wave rather than being wiped out by it, the Overton window of what is politically viable has shifted. It’s important that our policies be grounded in the new reality. The sheer scale of expected stimulus over the next two or three years will likely cast the die of our economy for decades to come.

As government makes this once-in-a-generation investment in the economy, it is vital that it look ahead and invest in building an economy that is ready for tomorrow, instead of spending large amounts of public money on infrastructure and technologies that will be outdated within a decade, as Smart Prosperity’s Stewart Elgie points out.

The last time officials at the federal Finance Department had to come up with a stimulus plan was in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008/09. Just 8% of the stimulus had a climate dimension, compared to 12% in the U.S., 38% in China and 59% in the European Union, according to HSBC Global Research.

This time is different: we have a government that was elected with a strong mandate for climate action and a clear 2050 net-zero carbon emissions target. Just don’t expect that, on its own, to have much sway on the finance officials who will be crafting the stimulus. They will be preoccupied with a single objective: get the economy growing and people back to work as quickly as possible.

There is a strong economic argument that a conventional stimulus will not be good enough. If we use yesterday’s playbook, Canadians risk being left behind at a crucial time of transition, as global demand and technology shift in favour of a more efficient low-carbon economy.

Applying a climate lens to the recovery package can help us identify some of the best opportunities to get people back to work immediately while building a more resilient Canada for the long term, ready to capitalize on new global growth trends.

One 2009 study by the International Monetary Fund on climate policy and recovery found that “environmental measures have been a valuable part of fiscal stimulus packages,” emphasizing that “energy efficiency investments are particularly well-suited to stimulus spending,” because they can be executed quickly.

In April, leaders in Canada’s clean energy sector wrote to the prime minister calling for a clean-energy-focused stimulus in order to “build a better, more resilient economy,” noting a special need to invest most in those regions that have been hit hardest by the collapsing oil price, such as Alberta.

Encouragingly, there are signs that clean economy investments could take centre stage in federal economic recovery plans, said a spokeswoman for Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson in April,

“When the recovery begins, Canada can build a stronger and more resilient economy by investing in a cleaner and healthier future for everyone.”

Inevitably, there will be pushback from some of Canada’s more entrenched interests. The response must be clear and unequivocal: a sustainable path is the only way forward if we want Canada to thrive long term.

As Canadians, this is our moment to think and act big.

In that spirit, today, we are launching a Building Back Better Green Recovery report series with contributions from some of Canada’s most inspired minds. And over the next seven weeks, Corporate Knights and partners will hold a weekly series of live conversations bringing together people with the ideas and the power to explore how Canada can use a renewed climate-based approach to build a stronger, more sustainable economy.

Our web host will be economist and public policy expert Diana Fox Carney.

These conversations will revolve around six themes: Buildings, Power, Transport, Heavy industry, Forests and Energy. Each session will begin with a table-setting analysis prepared by energy and environment expert Ralph Torrie, covering capital requirements, job creation, energy savings, emissions reductions, and the measures required to enable fast rollout.

Our goal: to inspire Canadian decision-makers to seize this opportunity to Build Back Better.

The 60-minute weekly series kicks off on Wednesday, April 22^nd (the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day), at 11 a.m. EDT. The series will continue at the same time each Wednesday through to June 3.

Each event will include reactions and suggestions from expert panelists as well as an opportunity for attendees to make suggestions and ask questions. Following each discussion, updated proposals will be shared with all participants for further refinement to inform a synthesis document to be presented in June.

Here’s the schedule. We hope you can join us.

Building Back Better with a Green Renovation Wave

Wednesday, April 22, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m. EDT

Building Back Better by Topping Up our Green Power Sources, Storage and Connections

Wednesday, April 29, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Building Back Better by Electrifying our Cars, Trucks and Buses

Wednesday, May 6, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Building Back Better by Greening Heavy Industry

Wednesday, May 13, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Building Back Better with Forests

Wednesday, May 20, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Building Back Better by Fueling Innovation in the Energy Sector

Wednesday, May 27, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

Building Back Better: The Wrap and Next Steps

Wednesday, June 3, 11 a.m. – 12 p.m.

The post The Canada we want: How a green recovery can help us bounce back stronger appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Women occupy a high percentage of positions in education, office support, social services and personal care, which are more likely to be suspended, laid off or forced to work reduced hours during the pandemic. PayScale noted that women “are also more likely to have to take time off work, or even resign their positions, in order to care for children who are no longer in school, as well as other family members.”

The report was released in advance of Equal Pay Day on March 31. With the stats saying that women earn on average only 75 to 80% as much as men, Equal Pay Day was founded to recognize the day of the year when women have finally made as much money over the past 15 months as their male colleagues earned in 12.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg spoke with Yahoo Finance about the impacts of the pandemic on women. “Because you have less savings, you have less ability to earn and so these problems we have that hit our most vulnerable — domestic violence, pay gaps — this is a wake-up call to fix them,” says Sandberg.

While that pay gap has been shrinking, it’s not happening fast enough to meet the goal of the Ontario-based Equal Pay Coalition: to achieve wage parity by 2025. Still, market forces are kicking in. As big companies today struggle to find talent, they’ve been adopting more formal structures, such as pay parity, special leadership programs and rules regarding sexual harassment, to promote equity for women and other disadvantaged groups.

Longer-term, the signs are more encouraging. Bloomberg publishes an annual Gender-Equality Index, which tracks the progress of public companies committed to supporting gender equality. This year’s list includes 16 Canadian companies, up from just 12 in 2019.

The full index includes 325 public companies around the world (up from 230 last year). Each company is worth at least US$1 billion, so it’s an exclusive list. But Bloomberg expects this project to accomplish two key objectives: encourage more businesses to adopt gender-equity policies and give investors more data on companies embracing progressive ethics.

Canuck companies on the list include all six major banks, plus insurance giant Manulife, as well as such outliers as Enbridge, Teck Resources and retailer Lululemon. Newcomers this year include Algonquin Power, Aurora Cannabis, toymaker Spin Master, engineering giant Stantec and electrical producer TransAlta.

Corporate Knights checked on a few of these firms to find out how they’re managing equality at the top. Our conclusion: awkwardly.

Only one of the 16 companies is headed by a woman: Dawn Farrell, CEO of TransAlta. The firm’s 12-person board includes only four women.

Kathleen Taylor chairs the board of RBC, and six women sit on the 14-seat board. But just one woman ranks among the bank’s 10 “executive officers.” She runs human resources.

Manulife lists 12 men on its senior leadership team and just three women. Marianne Harrison runs Manulife’s sprawling U.S. division, with assets nearing US$500 billion.

Lululemon is the only Canadian company with gender parity on its board: five men and five women. And its website lists a management team of six women and four men.

The post Female workers disproportionately affected by COVID-19 shutdown appeared first on Corporate Knights.