Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate Responsibility Discussion Paper

Corporate Citizenship and Social Responsibility:

An Agenda for Raising the Standards in Canada

(October 1994)

This Discussion Paper outlines the current situation concerning corporate citizenship and social responsibility in Canada, where we want to be, and sets out a framework for examining strategies and mechanisms for achieving more stringent citizenship and social responsibility standards for corporations in Canada.

Democracy Watch is calling on Canadian governments to examine and implement many of these proposals.

I. Introduction

From the moment we are born until the time we die, corporations dominate most facets of our lives. Our citizen roles of voter, taxpayer, worker, consumer and shareholder are all affected by corporations. They produce and sell the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in, the vehicles we travel in and the entertainment we enjoy. Corporations affect the quality of our environment and shape the values of our society, influencing the areas of law, taxation, education, communications, athletics, families and organized religion through corporate lobbying, polluting, advertising, and sponsorship.

Large Canadian corporations and transnational corporations (TNCs) are especially influential. Because of the sheer size of these corporations, the decisions of the relatively few people who control them exert great influence on the decision-making of local, provincial and national governments, and can have great impact on the communities in which these corporations are located. For these reasons, there is a need for a social responsibility framework for large corporations and TNCs especially, a framework that enables individual citizens and communities to hold corporations accountable to community interests.

Central to this framework is the comparison between individual citizenship and corporate citizenship. When a person immigrates to Canada, they are put through a rigorous...