The concept seems a bit quaint now, but it used to be common to picture good corporate citizenship as a three-legged stool. Getting things right required solid materials and a steady balance between the newly conceived-as-equal environmental, social and economic legs.
But the stool looks a little shakier when we pull the lens back to look at corporate Canada as a whole. On social performance, and within the full cohort, average CEO pay jumped 18 per cent from 2019 to 2021, and average employee pay only 4 per cent. Profits meanwhile were up 74 per cent and cash taxes paid only 33 per cent.
Fully a third of investments made by the Best 50 Corporate Citizens last year qualified as sustainable, and for this year’s Best 50 that jumped to half – an encouraging trend also evident in the economy as a whole. Among the full cohort of companies assessed, sustainable investment rose 124 per cent from $17.1-billion in 2019 to $38.3-billion in 2021.