Designed to Pass
Why Canada's reconciliation scorecards answer to the wrong people
A Permanent Home for These Writings
For a while now, I've been looking for a more permanent home for my articles and writing. Many of the pieces you'll find here were first published on the Pehta Foundation blog. That blog is no longer around, and when it went, these articles went with
The Accountability Inversion
Companies are producing more Indigenous impact data than ever. But when the organization being measured writes the measuring stick, reporting becomes self-description — not accountability. Two companies each report $20 million in Indigenous procurement. The first counted verified payments to businesses owned by the Nations affected by its projects — net
Beyond the Reconciliation Action Plan: What a Meaningful RAP Actually Requires
There is no shortage of Reconciliation Action Plans in the market. Mining companies have them. Utilities have them. Construction firms, banks, universities, law firms, hospitals, Crown corporations, and professional services firms increasingly have them too. Some are a page on a website. Some are glossy PDFs. Some are built around
Indigenous Participation Doesn’t Matter
Abstract Of course Indigenous participation matters. The satire in this title works only because the opposite claim is so obviously indefensible. The real question is not whether Indigenous participation matters in principle, but whether Canadian institutions behave as though it matters in practice. In governance terms, something “matters” when it
Who Gets to Speak for “Impact”?
Rebuilding Social Impact Reporting from Community Authority Up Social impact reporting has become one of corporate life’s most familiar rituals. Annual sustainability reports, DEI scorecards, community investment dashboards, “inclusive culture” indices, supplier diversity disclosures, and human rights statements now arrive with the same regularity as audited financials. Most are
Why Credible Impact Reporting Cannot Be Cheap
Accountability, Comparability, and the Limits of Spreadsheets and BI Tools For more than a decade, organizations have been told that social and Indigenous impact reporting is primarily a problem of visibility. If only the right dashboard could be built, the thinking goes, decision-makers would finally be able to see
PART II — The Decade Lost: How a Rights-Blind Sustainability Regime Could Unravel Trust, Distort Markets, and Fracture Canada’s Path to Accountability
Introduction: When the Architecture Fails Standards do not fail in spectacular fashion. They fail quietly—through omissions, blind spots, misplaced priorities, conceptual shortcuts, and the subtle erosion of legitimacy that accumulates when the wrong foundations are chosen at the outset. In the world of sustainability reporting, where the architecture being
Why Industry Should Stop Calling Its Claims “Impact”
Reframing Social and Indigenous Reporting Around Opportunity, Benefit, and Authority Over the past decade, the language of “impact” has become ubiquitous across corporate reporting, finance, infrastructure, and procurement. Companies now routinely claim to measure and report their social impact, Indigenous impact, or community impact—often with polished dashboards, standardized indicators,
Part 1 - The Missing Architecture of Rights: How a Conceptual Misstep in Canada’s Sustainability Standards Strategy Risks Undermining Trust, Compliance, and Capital Allocation
Introduction: A Strategic Plan with a Structural Blind Spot Canada finds itself at an inflection point in the evolution of its sustainability reporting landscape. With global standards accelerating through the ISSB and converging investor expectations around climate, governance, human capital, and nature-related risks, Canada has moved to establish its
The Perils of Premature Labelling: Why Indigenous Bonds Demand Indigenous Governance
The Market’s Newest Label When the Bank of Montreal announced this week that it would issue North America’s first “Indigenous Bond,” the press release landed with the weight of a milestone. A major Canadian bank was committing $200 million toward Indigenous-owned enterprises and communities, positioning the instrument
Rethinking FPIC Without Diminishing It: Making Consent Continuous, Verifiable, and Accountable
The Promise and the Problem For more than a generation, Free, Prior, and Informed Consent—known everywhere by its acronym, FPIC—has been held up as the global benchmark for respecting Indigenous rights in the face of development. It is codified in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of