Top 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada released for 2010

Toronto – Corporate Knights has released the 10th Annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada, the definitive annual list of Canada’s top corporate citizens.

Visit the Corporate Knights website for the full list, as well as related reports.  

The leading corporate ranking of Canadian corporate citizenship transparently ranks companies’ relative carbon, water, waste and energy impacts. Other citizenship indicators include pension fund quality, board diversity, ratio of CEO-pay to lowest paid worker, 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 2011 was The Co-operators Group Limited, a Canadian-owned, multi-product insurance and financial services organization with more than $42.4 billion in assets under administration. With strong board diversity, board oversight (with a dedicated sustainability committee), relatively low resource use, an embedded sustainability mandate, and a deep integration of sustainability and climate resilience into its suite of insurance products, The Co-operators Group earned 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, being recognized by the global initiative, Rate the Raters, as a best practice rating.

Corporate Knights defines a good corporate citizen 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 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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