Employee share ownership purchase plans are one type of gainsharing. They exist in many corporations but mainly in larger ones. At every pay date, employees have the option to automatically withdraw a prearranged percentage of their wage in order to buy shares of the company they work for. Most employers cap the percentage the employees can dedicate towards buying shares each year and some will even match contributions up to a certain percentage. For instance, a company may allow an employee to contribute 9% of his/her income and will match half of any contribution up to 6%. So if you choose to contribute 8%, the corporation will pay 3%. Or if you choose to contribute 5%, the corporation will pay 2.5%.

There are many benefits to such a program. First, in the eyes of the employer, the employee will be more concerned about and committed to bottom line results because they own shares in it as minority shareholders. Second, from the employees' perspective, they get an easy way to participate in the stock market and, in some cases, they get to purchase shares at subsidized discount rates through an employer matching program. Third, the employer and employee are locked into a mutual emphasis on productivity, waste reduction, and profit-seeking results.

Ethical investing is either "the screening out of particular investments that fail to meet certain specified ethical criteria" or "a positive choice of investments that fulfill certain social objectives" (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 5, Issue 3, page 43). In other words, values-based or ethical investors make personal choices on what criteria they will boycott, such as business dealings in repressive regimes, tobacco manufacturers, or military involvement, or what criteria they will actively search out, such as a good environmental record, community involvement, or good employee treatment and policies.

SRI did not have a very popular or reassuring beginning. There were a lot of allegations in the media that ethical funds were scams because "the majority of fund managers in Canada [did] little systematic in-house social research and few [looked] to outside research organizations for assistance with specific company analyses or broad portfolio wide analyses" (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 5, Issue 5, page 76). If more fund managers had been proactive and forthright about researching their companies, and if the quality of internal and external research was higher, and if there were national ethical practice standards for fund managers and institutional investors, then criticism from the media, researchers, investors, and the public of various ethical funds would likely have not been so great. Furthermore, ethical investing did not take off as an integrated or coordinated enterprise, even for the groups most likely to invest ethically, such as churches, universities, labour unions, and other groups with specific social justice agendas. As of the late 1980s, these types of investors "controlled a huge slice of Corporate Canada through the billions of dollars they manage;" however, "despite this economic prominence, Canadian churches, universities and labour unions largely ignored or resisted SRI" (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 5, Issue 5, page 76).

Despite these sober beginnings, socially responsible investing has become much more mainstream and accepted in the business community. As of 1999, socially responsible investing was a $2-3 trillion business in Canada. Ethical investing is now seen as making good economic sense because "risk is minimized, investment decisions are more informed, and returns are at least equal to standard returns from average indexes" (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 5, Issue 3, page 44). Not only are more people investing ethically but they are taking their role as minority shareholders more seriously by "submitting and voting on proxy resolutions and attempting to influence a corporation to act in ways that enhance the well-being of all stakeholders and potentially improve financial performance over time" (The Corporate Ethics Monitor, Volume 9, Issue 5, page 77).

Despite having become mainstream for many advocacy groups and individual investors, socially responsible investing had never been fully accepted by the major Canadian financial institutions, such as public sector pension funds, banks, and insurance companies, as demonstrated by their lack of screened investment products or environmental and social mutual funds, until now. Advocates of SRI should be encouraged by two recent announcements. The Bank of Montreal recently announced that because 'investing in companies that are committed to ensuring their activities are compatible with environmental, social and community interests is an area we feel our clients will be very interested in,' the bank has created a Sustainable Development Investing Division. Likewise, FTSE4Good has announced that EthicScan will join with a consortium of other research companies providing Canadian data for its new family of national, continental, and international ethical investment indexes. Because FTSE is one of the world's leading equity index suppliers, the FTSE4Good indices will raise the profile of ethical investment all over the world and will put pressure on international companies to provide more information to ethical analysts than in the past. This should make it much easier for analysts, researchers, social auditors, and fund managers to identify those companies which are best responding to the new agendas of social and environmental performance.

Perhaps with these announcements, the other major Canadian banks as well as insurers, trust companies, unions, and other groups will begin to embrace ethical investing wholeheartedly and SRI will be fully accepted into the business community.