New in 2009: Top Foreign Corporate Citizens in Canada

(Toronto, Ontario, June 22, 2009) Corporate Knights has released the 8th Annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada, the definitive annual list of Canada’s top corporate citizens.

Citizenship indicators include pension fund quality, board and C-suite diversity, CEO-pay fairness, and tax dollar generation, as well as sector specific indicators such as renewable energy investments (for financial companies) and respect for human rights (for mining companies). This year, companies’ Aboriginal relations were weighed as a key performance indicator (KPI) for the extractive sectors (forestry, mining, oil and gas, utilities), and Aboriginal banking as a KPI for the financials sector. Eventually, Corporate Knights hopes to include Aboriginal relations as a KPI for all sectors.

The Best Corporate Citizen for 2009 was Hydro One. Its pension quality is top in the utilities sector, with more assets for each current fulltime employee than any other company. Hydro One is also one of four companies in our Best 50 to have a female CEO, and its board of directors includes three females and one director from a visible minority. The utility has also rolled out over 780,000 smart meters across Ontario by end of 2008, with a plan to have a smart meter in every home and business by 2010, enabling the implementation of time-of-use rates. Hydro One’s comprehensive Conservation and Demand Management program, launched in 2005, saves 272 million kWh each year.

The Corporate Knights Best 50 methodology for grading corporate citizenship, developed with financial support from Industry Canada, has helped raise the rigour and professionalism of what it means to be a good corporate citizen. Corporate Knights defines it as a company that fulfills its part of the social contract, while innovating solutions to pressing social and environmental challenges of our time. According to American think tank RAND Corp., income tax avoidance will be “corporate America’s next big scandal.”

Corporate Knights’ ranking, subjected to outside scrutiny and review by Deloitte since 2007, applies a transparent methodology that calibrates important metrics from pension fund health and responsible accounting to executive pay and shareholder conflict. Many of these metrics that Corporate Knights has been tracking for years have recently moved to the forefront of the business pages with the crackdown on tax havens and the pension fund crunch.