2021 Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada announced

Call to action for Canadian businesses to lead the race to zero-emissions economy.

TORONTO, June 30, 2021 /CNW/ - Corporate Knights Inc. today released the 20th annual Best 50 Corporate Citizens in Canada ranking. Selected from a pool of 271 Canadian companies, including all those with revenues over $1 billion ? each evaluated on a set of 24 environmental, social and governance indicators, relative to their industry peers and using publicly available information ? the Best 50 companies set the standard for sustainability leadership in Canada.

The top-ranked company in this year's Best 50 is Hydro-Québec. Sharing the Top 10 laurels are Montreal-based gas distribution utility Énergir (the former Gaz-Métro); Guelph, Ontario, insurance firm The Co-operators; Canadian National Railway; Toronto-based electronics manufacturer Celestica; Edmonton design and engineering firm Stantec; Edmonton-based energy and water distributor EPCOR Utilities; Vancouver-based, values-driven credit union Vancity; municipal electricity distributor Toronto Hydro; and Montreal real estate investor Ivanhoé Cambridge, which in April announced its commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 for its portfolio of 800 shopping centres, office buildings, hotels and residential communities on five continents.

Hydro-Québec earned the top spot because of top-quartile scores in areas such as water productivity, cash taxes paid, executive and board gender diversity, clean investment and clean revenue (based on hydro, solar, wind and biomass generation and transmission revenue).

As a group, Canada's Best 50 Corporate Citizens outpaced other run-of-the-mill big businesses in Canada (with revenues of more than $1 billion) with a higher percentage of revenues earned from sustainable solutions (29% vs. 17%), higher board gender diversity (34% vs. 27%) and a lower CEO-to-average-worker pay ratio (19:1 vs. 90:1).

"The Best 50 Corporate Citizens are living proof that there is a cleaner, more fair and inclusive way to do business," said Toby Heaps, CEO of Corporate Knights. "These are companies where people can be proud to work and where investors can invest in the growing clean and fair economy the world is hungry for."

This year's Best Corporate Citizen Roundtable event is intended to help galvanize Canadian businesses to adopt science-based targets that align with a low-carbon future, most notably the Business Ambition for 1.5°C commitment, a "call to action from a global coalition of UN agencies, business and industry leaders," and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero for financial sector companies.

To date, 607 companies have made Business Ambition for 1.5°C commitments, 10 of which are Canadian.

For full list and methodology, go to https://www.corporateknights.com/reports/best-50/

About Corporate Knights: Corporate Knights Inc. includes the sustainable business magazine Corporate Knights and a research division that produces rankings and financial-product ratings based on corporate sustainability performance. Corporate Knights was named Magazine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards in 2013 and won the SABEW Canada Silver Award for Investigative Reporting in 2019.

SOURCE Corporate Knights Inc.