Shoppers Drug Mart Top Corporate Citizen in Canada
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The fifth annual ranking of Canada’s Best 50 Corporate Citizens, sponsored by The Ethical Funds Company, was announced today to a room full of TSX executives at the Arcadian Court in Toronto. The results will be published in the June 26th issue of Corporate Knights magazine.
The scores for the ranking that assessed companies listed on the TSX S&P/Composite Index covered 13 different indicators including tax generation, pension fund coverage, toxic releases, transparency around political lobbying, ratio of CEO compensation to company’s relative earnings, and board diversity. All indicators came from publicly available sources.
The Top Corporate Citizen in 2006, Shoppers Drug Mart, paid 100 per cent of its statutory tax obligation, scored 100 per cent in CEO pay relative to company earnings, fully funded its pension plan, had board membership that included three female directors out of 11, and also had a high relative number of female key executives (39 per cent), while showing no subsidiaries in tax haven countries or shareholder conflicts.
“This year’s survey shows some good news and some bad news,” said Toby Heaps, editor of Corporate Knights. “On the good side, TSX Composite companies are better than US counterparts by half at tax generation. Canadian companies pay about 2/3 of their statutory tax obligation in cash, whereas US companies only pay about half.”
The Corporate Knights survey found two key areas where corporate Canada is lacking: pension fund coverage and diversity. The survey found that among 145 defined benefit pension plans, unfunded liabilities spiked by 34 per cent last year, growing to 25.6 billion dollars.
The survey also found that there is still a glass ceiling for female executives. Only 13 per cent of TSX composite company key executives are female and that number goes to less than 10 per cent when you look at boards. “At the board level, for a society as diverse as ours, Canadian companies have a stunningly low number of visible minorities,” Mr. Heaps commented. Almost 90 per cent of TSX Composite boards have not a single visible minority among their ranks.
The Hon. David Peterson and the Hon. Jim Bradley were also presented with the Corporate Knights Award of Distinction for introducing the Countdown Acid Rain program in 1985 that initiated a series of actions across North American jurisdictions that culminated in significant reductions of acid rain.
Corporate Knights is Canada’s magazine for responsible business. www.corporateknights.ca
@ June 20, 2006