We can no longer claim ignorance about the companies we do business with. EthicScan Canada has compiled profiles of 114 major corporations that among them dominate the retail industry in this country. Sadly, publishers and booksellers are not included in the survey, but you will find Sega and Nintendo there.

Shopping With a Conscience will not tell you where to find the best quality, fastest service, or cheapest price. It will tell customers and investors which companies have the best environmental performance, greatest community involvement, most progressive staff policies, and most ethical sourcing practices. Charities looking for likely donors, and job-hunters looking for companies with specific policies like extended maternity leave or same-sex benefits will also find the book helpful.

There’s an honour roll for the top performers in every category except Canadian Content. Fewer than half of these corporations are Canadian-owned. And those that are may make no effort to buy from Canadian sources, while a foreign-owned rival may go to some lengths to do so.

Another category is candour: privately owned firms don’t have to divulge this kind of information, and even publicly owned companies often reject EthicScan’s questionnaires as invasive and time-consuming. In EthicScan’s previous book, The Ethical Shoppers Guide to Canadian Supermarket Products (1992), lack of information in a specific category was expressed as a question mark. In this book, stonewallers are given a zero.

Retailers know that most customers don’t give a hoot about ethical practices, as long as the product is good and the price is right. However, EthicScan Canada believes that the 23–28% of us who do care can make a tremendous difference. For instance, if a union pension fund is a large shareholder in a company that has low ratings for staff policies, management practices, and labour relations, pressure can be brought to bear on the corporation through the pension fund managers. For individual customers and shareholders, more effective than just redirecting our dollars is letting companies know that we’re doing it, and why. Each company listing comes with phone numbers, e-mail and postal addresses, but no fax numbers. Perhaps they’re afraid of running out of paper.