Q. How do you determine the Best 50 and Top Foreign Corporate Citizens in Canada?

A. See our methodology here.

Q. What happened to...?

A.
Tim Hortons (down to 98 from 39)
The ubiquitous coffee retailer took a tumble in our ranking this year. While Tim Hortons has focused on reusable mugs, anti-litter programs, recyclable packaging, and diverting coffee grinds from landfills, it lags behind its sector peers in product life cycle management and eco-social product innovation. The company mentions no concrete targets for improvement in its reporting. While Tim’s has a Sustainable Coffee program that provides environmental and social support to farmers in Latin America, it is unclear what proportion of coffee is purchased from farmers under this program.
 
Tembec Inc. (down to 70 from 32)
The forestry company’s baseline indicators fell significantly this year, and Tembec ranked last in pension health and second-last in ratio of C-suite pay to company profits. While the company has the greatest coverage of FSC-certified forests in Canada, Tembec fails to disclose its accident data and lags behind its sector peers in offering environmentally differentiated products.
 
Westport Innovations Inc. (down to 37 from 9)
Shooting up to ninth from 71st in 2008, Westport settled in the middle of our Best 50 this year. While it had the highest KPI score in the Industrials sector thanks to its cleantech product focus, its baseline indicators suffered. Westport’s high C-suite pay-to-profit ratio ranked it eighth out of ten in its sector, and the company’s profit is still negative.
 
TELUS Corp. (up to 8 from 56)
While the communications company’s baseline score remained the same, its KPI score increased by ten points. As sector peers scaled back their sustainability initiatives, TELUS set ambitious environmental and social targets while quantifying metrics like greenhouse gas emissions intensity per dollar of revenue.
 
Toronto-Dominion Bank (up to 22 from 100)
TD excelled this year with its commitment to Aboriginal banking (the bank owns 9 per cent of the First Nations Bank of Canada, and will eventually turn complete ownership over to Aboriginal shareholders) and public policy engagement regarding greenhouse gas emission reduction. TD Asset Management signed the UN Principles for Responsible Investing in 2008, and TD Business Banking incorporates environmental due diligence into the lending process. TD is also the only big bank to have two CEOs: one chief executive officer, and one chief environment officer.
 
Husky Energy (up to 33 from 115)
The most diverse leadership in its sector and good pension health shored up Husky’s baseline scores, while its KPI score also rose. Husky had the lowest water usage intensity in the Oil and Gas sector and a renewable fuels portfolio that includes ethanol.

Q. Why are there two lists? Why rank foreign-owned Canadian companies at all?

A. The two lists have come about as we continue to refine our methodology to fairly examine Canadian and foreign-based companies. In years past, we ranked these companies using parent company financial information (the only publicly available data), but put a strong weight on Canadian information for the key performance indicator (KPI) ranking. With the differences in size between foreign-based and Canadian-based companies, and increasingly global sustainability reporting that rarely focused on Canadian operations, it became clear that the Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada had to focus on Canadian-based companies. But foreign-owned companies have a large impact on the Canadian economy, so we felt it was important to recognize their contributions. We are proud of the companies on both of our lists.

Q. What happened to last year's #1, 3, and 4 Best 50 Corporate Citizens?

A. IBM (#1) and Rio Tinto (#4) are now on our Top Foreign Corporate Citizens in Canada. Top Foreign Corporate Citizens had to be rated AA or higher by RiskMetrics Group (parent of Innovest Strategic Value Advisors), provider of our Global 100 research, on a scale of DDD to AAA to make our list. McKesson (#3) was not rated by RiskMetrics.

Q. What does it tell us that your cover shows four women, two Asians, and no blacks amongst about 60 people?

A. It tells us there is a fierce urgency to catch CEO leadership up to the realities of our society.