(Toronto, Ontario, June 22, 2010) Corporate Knights has released the 9^th Annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada, the definitive annual list of Canada’s top corporate citizens.

Other citizenship indicators include pension fund quality, board 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).

The Best Corporate Citizen for 2010 was Mountain Equipment Co-op. With strong board diversity, relatively low resource use, an embedded sustainability mandate, and strong supply chain management, MEC deserves the honour of the top corporate citizen in Canada.

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.

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 resource use. 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.

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