Good for businesss: Corporate Social Responsibility report 2010
By macleans.ca - Monday, June 14, 2010 - 3 Comments
Our second annual survey of companies in Canada that prove it pays to have a conscience
For many successful companies, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is no longer just a boardroom buzzword, but a key to business. So, for the second year in a row, Maclean’s has partnered with Jantzi-Sustainalytics, a global leader in sustainability analysis, to present the country’s Top 50 Socially Responsible Corporations.
While the reasons each company was selected vary—from Gildan Activewear donating more than half a million dollars to Haitian relief efforts, to Loblaw’s commitment to acquiring all of its seafood from sustainable sources by 2013, to Nike making World Cup jerseys for nine national teams out of bottles found in landfills—the underlying goal is the same: make the world a better place. As well as the Top 50 list, which begins on page 42, we look into how CSR might help with major PR problems, like BP’s oil spill, and whether the recession made the business world any less socially responsible.
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Top 50 Socially Responsible Corporations
By macleans.ca - Monday, June 14, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 28 Comments
These companies have made doing good a big part of their business
Click on a company name for more details:
Adidas Group
Ballard Power Systems Inc.
BCE Inc.
BMO Bank of Montreal
BMW
Brookfield Properties Corp.
Cascades Inc.
Catalyst Paper
CIBC
Dell Inc.
Direct Energy
Enbridge Inc.
Gap Inc.
General Mills Inc.
Gildan Activewear Inc.
H.J. Heinz Company
Honda
Hewlett-Packard Company
HSBC
IBM Corp.
ING Group
Intel Corp.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Kinross Gold Corp.
Loblaw Companies Ltd.
L’Oreal
Manulife Financial.
McDonald’s Corp.
Nexen Inc. .
Nike Inc.
Nokia
Oracle Corp.
Puma
RBC
Rio Tinto-Alcan
Scotiabank
Sony Corp.
Stantec Inc.
Starbucks Corp.
State Street Corp.
Sun Life Financial
Suncor Energy Inc.
Talisman Energy Inc.
TELUS Corp,
TD Bank Financial Group
TransAlta Corp.
Transcontinental Inc.
Volkswagen
Westport Innovations Inc.
Xerox Corp.For the related article and methodology, The Jantzi-Maclean’s Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2010 click here.
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What if it doesn’t go as planned?
By John Geddes - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 11:55 AM - 11 Comments
Flaherty projects five years of about five per cent growth
Photograph by Sean Kilpatrick/ CP
Everything in Jim Flaherty’s 2010 budget hinges on his forecasts. The finance minister’s plan to shrink the deficit from a staggering $49.2 billion this year to a pesky $1.8 billion in just five years depends on steady economic growth. He’s often challenged for projecting five consecutive years of growth of around five per cent, including inflation. But Flaherty has a great comeback: he’s using the average of 15 respected private forecasts. He’s been known to rhyme off the forecasters’ names, as he began to in question period last week—“TD Bank, BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank…”—before the Speaker cut him off.
That roll call, though, may sound weightier than it really is. Of those 15 firms, Flaherty’s department told Maclean’s, six don’t attempt to project as far out as 2013-14 and 2014-15—the crucial years in his deficit-busting narrative. Of the remaining nine, some are less than ringingly confident about the numbers they offer. Take BMO Capital Markets, whose outlook is a touch more optimistic than the forecast average used in the budget. “We generally do not publish our long-range economic forecasts,” said Douglas Porter, BMO’s deputy chief economist, “and I would view these more as ‘assumptions’ than as ‘forecasts.’ ” Don Drummond, the chief economist at TD Bank Financial Group, is somewhat more pessimistic than the forecast average. Still, Drummond isn’t dismissive. “It is not as though they dreamed up a scenario biased to the optimistic,” he said. He views the budget assumptions as “credible,” although “the economy and revenues could certainly underperform.”
Yet Flaherty doesn’t build in any cushion against such potential disappointments. In his 2009 budget, he adjusted the private-sector forecast down just to be prudent—but not in 2010. Gone, too, is the old Liberal practice of setting aside contingency reserves. For Flaherty’s deficit-fighting plan to work, there can be no unpleasant surprises.
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Econowatch
By Jason Kirby - Friday, October 30, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 4 Comments
A weekly scorecard on the state of the economy in North America and beyond
Forget what economists have told you about how stimulus programs are supposed to function during a recession. You can learn a lot more from watching a master illusionist at work.Take America’s US$8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers. Like any stimulus measure meant to jolt the economy out of recession, the tax credit was always more about smoke and mirrors than economic theory. When Washington created the program eight months ago, its aim was to conjure the illusion of stability in the housing market. Until the free fall in house prices could be halted, a broader economic recovery could never take hold. Continue…
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Econowatch
By Steve Maich - Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments
The new normal: Call it frugality if you like. We call it sanity.
When will things go back to normal? That is the only question that seems to matter: when will this strange and frightening episode pass? It’s a fair question, but not exactly the right one. What most really mean is: when will my house price begin soaring again? How long before my stocks triple? And when will I feel safe to max out my credit cards again? Over the past 15 years that became “normal,” or at least common. But that isn’t coming back soon.The reality is, everything we see happening around us is part of the process of returning to normal. For the past decade or so the laws of financial gravity were suspended. Now they are back in force, and those who soared the highest have the furthest to fall.
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Richer than you think?
By Colin Campbell - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 9:43 PM - 2 Comments
Scotiabank slowly backs away from its famous slogan
Recently, in a movie theatre in downtown Toronto, the audience was suffering through the pre-movie ads when a familiar message from Scotiabank flashed on the screen: “You’re richer than you think.” That’s when one heckler loudly offered, “Not anymore!” and the theatre erupted in laughter. It turns out that was one of the tamer responses to the ad, which is playing to mocking audiences in Cineplex theatres across the country. In Vancouver, where condo prices are crashing, the ad has been met by obscenities and even the hurling of soft drinks.
It’s safe to say that wasn’t the reaction marketers were looking for when they cooked up the campaign. But in this age of economic turmoil, that’s what they’re getting. Even the Royal Canadian Air Farce has poked fun at the slogan by turning it on its head so it reads, “We’re richer than you think.” The scoffing response to the award-winning ad offers up a cautionary tale for advertisers, especially banks. Advertising can be tricky at the best of times, but selling financial advice during a nasty recession is like walking through a minefield.
