Putting our purpose into action

Our progress towards addressing our blind spots

Holding ourselves accountable while helping organizations align around reporting standards to drive better quality outcomes: As part of the development of PwC’s Global Centre for Nature Positive Business to support organizations in their climate and nature journeys, this year we helped develop an overview of nature-related data tools and case studies, available on the Task Force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) website. Driven by interest from financial institutions, we also contributed to the TNFD's Biodiversity Footprinting Discussion Paper and refined our own nature-based materiality assessment of the land footprint of our offices. We continued to report that our Vancouver office is next to a key biodiversity or protected area, and we put a greater emphasis on understanding our physical impacts on the surrounding natural environment. For more information, read our PwC Network Environment Report.

We also continued to actively participate in coalitions to advance environmental sustainability across our global network of firms. These included the LEAF Coalition, a public-private effort to protect tropical forests; the World Economic Forum’s First Movers Coalition, which brings together companies using their purchasing power to create early markets for innovative clean technologies across eight hard-to-abate sectors; and the WEF’s Clean Skies for Tomorrow coalition, which seeks to help the world transition to sustainable aviation fuels. 

PwC also maintains a membership and participates actively in the ISSB Partnership Framework for capacity building, which aims to support implementation of global sustainability standards. Within Canada, we participated in the Implementation Committee for the Canadian Sustainability Standards Board (CSSB) to develop the initial institutional structure by defining and codifying key governance and due process considerations. We also helped establish a robust structure that will support the development of standards in the public interest that can be adopted by various sectors in Canada. In addition, we published our 2024 ESG Reporting Insights report for public companies to help benchmark progress across standards and reinforced these findings through our playbook for technology-enabled ESG reporting.

Continued to take action on employee feedback to further embed trust within our firm’s culture: External market dynamics continued to drive overall reductions in trust of business leadership across all sectors. We weren’t immune to this trend.

Our People Trust Index decreased slightly to 72% from 75% towards our 85% target. Our people’s sentiments around being treated fairly also decreased (to 73% from 75%), as did feelings of being treated well (to 76% from 79%). Like many organizations, we reimagined our business model over the last year.  This included new investments that were made to transform our delivery of services and resulted in a downward adjustment to our headcount in Canada. 

Feedback from our people suggests that we can do more to be transparent about how business decisions are made and what actions are taken, sharing context about the reasons why more often, while being clear and consistent with how we communicate information across our business matrix. We’re learning that there can also be unintended consequences when we share too many details about programs or initiatives that can cause information overload, even when the spirit of transparency is at the heart of our efforts. We remain committed to finding the right balance.

Over the past year, we launched the evolved PwC Professional across the firm, a set of six core behaviours based on the principles of trusted leadership and distinctive outcomes. We also used insights from our quarterly trust leadership dashboard to launch new programs. These include Parentaly, which supports parental leave transitions, and introduced virtual care and Total Mental Health to enable more access to physical and mental health services. We plan to continue to share more about what we’re learning and how we’re adapting to feedback.

Achieved gender parity across several leadership groups and took action on workforce representation to support greater diversity on our teams: This year, we achieved gender parity on our Partnership Board (by increasing the representation of women to 50% from 46%) and our Extended Leadership Team (reaching 56%, up from 48%). We also increased the representation of visible minorities within the partnership (to 22% from 16%, exceeding our target of 20%) and across the firm (to 47%, up from 44%). But we didn’t move the needle as fast in regards to our Indigenous and disability populations across the firm.

To help accelerate the transformation of our corporate culture and further embed an environment of belonging, we introduced several new initiatives to increase accountability based on feedback from our annual equity, inclusion, diversity and belonging (EIDB) survey. These include:

• Launching our Indigenous Reconciliation Advisory Committee and announcing our commitment to the Partnership Accreditation in Indigenous Relations (PAIR) program to advance our Indigenous reconciliation efforts: Established in 2001 by the Canadian Council for Indigenous Business (CCIB), the PAIR program supports efforts towards progressive improvement in Indigenous relations and evaluates performance in four pivotal areas: leadership actions, employment, business development and community relations (engagement and support). The commitment to PAIR is a significant part of our ongoing work to foster mutual respect and drive sustainable outcomes with Indigenous communities and peoples. PAIR provides independent and third-party verification of organizational reports.
• Developing a partnership with Lime Connect: Lime Connect is a not-for-profit offering premier resources for students and young professionals in the disability space across Canada to help empower a community of peers with shared experiences. It also helps those with a visible or non-visible self-identified disability make connections to support professional development, gain access to career tools to develop skills and, ultimately, build confidence in navigating the workplace as a person with a disability.

Our progress on maintaining trust around our core competencies

Continued to strengthen audit quality: The Canadian Public Accountability Board (CPAB) undertakes an annual inspection of the quality of PwC Canada’s work as auditors of Canadian reporting issuers. In March 2024, CPAB issued a report on the 2023 inspections for all firms. As at June 30, 2024, the 2024 CPAB inspection was underway and is likely to conclude towards the end of 2024. While we can’t share the results publicly due to regulatory restrictions, we continue to take pride in our CPAB inspection results.

In addition, the firm is registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) and subject to PCAOB inspections on a sample of clients where we’re auditors of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registrants and their affiliates. While we’re not satisfied with our most recent PCAOB results, we are confident in our continued ability to deliver strong audit quality. We have analyzed the root cause of the matters raised, have taken remedial actions and remain focused on continuous improvement. No PCAOB inspections took place in 2023 and the 2024 PCAOB inspection was underway at the time of writing and is likely to be concluded by the end of 2024. For more information, read our Transparency Report, which includes additional information about our audit practice and related services.

Conducted testing to reinforce our commitment to independence: All PwC Canada partners and practice staff must complete annual training and a compliance confirmation, through which they confirm their compliance with relevant aspects of our independence policy. Professional staff are subject to personal independence compliance testing on a targeted or random basis. Findings of external non-compliance represented 0.9% of tests completed, up from 0.7% as of our last fiscal year.

Strengthened the psychological safety underpinning our culture of speaking up: At PwC, we’re committed to conducting our business to high standards, which includes treating each other, our clients and the community in an ethical manner. It’s an important way we build trust. Our Speak-up Index is composed of responses to our People Trust Survey, which assesses employees’ knowledge of, and interaction with, our ethics protocols. It includes industry-standard elements for measuring awareness of channels for escalation as well as experiences and satisfaction when raising ethical matters. This year’s results remained stable at 80% (down slightly from 81% the previous year). We continued to strive to get better each year through increased communication, training and continuous improvements.

This year, we focused on increasing our people’s awareness of and familiarity with escalation channels and implemented feedback from our monthly trust survey through transparency about how an investigation works, response timelines and ongoing stakeholder communications. We believe that as a result of this effort, satisfaction scores within the survey increased, specifically related to situations where issues were raised to the centralized ethics team and our people’s experience during the investigation process. This remains an area for continuous improvement.

Reinforced our commitment to quality and compliance with our network’s professional standards: Quality and compliance are at the heart of our purpose and a top priority for our stakeholders. Our measures related to engagement quality and compliance reflect our values and a culture of transparency and continuous improvement.

There was a material increase in hours this year. We further enhanced our focus on pre-issuance reviews including testing and monitoring of our system of quality controls. This reflects the ongoing development of standards and market expectations both nationally and globally.

By dedicating more resources to compliance and quality, we can identify potential risks and issues early, addressing them proactively rather than reactively. This prevents problems from escalating and ensures our clients receive the highest standard of service.  

We’re committing to maintaining our strong track record as part of our 2025 fiscal year targets. PwC Canada is in compliance with our network’s code of conduct and upholds its professional standards and values through every interaction with our stakeholders each day.

Doubling down on investments in AI and cyber security: As part of our announcement to invest $200 million over the next three years to expand our artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, PwC Canada was one of the first Canadian organizations over the past year to implement generative AI tools and technology across the organization through the deployment of Copilot for Microsoft 365. The firm-wide adoption of this innovative technology further strengthened our commitment to get technology into the hands of our people while helping to guide organizations in their digital transformation.

We also collaborated with Google Cloud to bring a cost-optimized and innovative solution to the market to help organizations better protect themselves against cybersecurity attacks. The solution, known as Managed Extended Detection and Response (MXDR), helps organizations manage cybersecurity threats and protect their data.

We also published our inaugural 2024 Global AI Jobs Barometer, which analyzed more than half a billion job ads from 15 countries and found AI could help many nations to break out of persistent low productivity growth and generate economic development, higher wages and enhanced living standards. The report found that for every job posting requiring AI specialist skills (i.e., machine learning) in 2012, there are now seven job ads. It also found that the growth in positions demanding AI skills has outpaced all jobs since 2016. In fact, the number of postings requiring AI skills grew 3.5 times faster than all jobs

Our progress on the table stakes disclosures our stakeholders care about most

Pay equality and transparency: In 2022, we undertook a comprehensive, two-year analysis of our pay equity landscape and have set and publicly disclosed aspirational targets for equity in compensation for women and visible minorities by the end of our 2025 fiscal year. Over the past year, we have refined our compensation programs to enhance consistency across competencies and grade levels. We also continued to identify and monitor factors that could contribute to wage gaps to ensure we’re advancing and realizing fair and equitable pay for all.

As part of this process, we worked with our data analytics group on reviewing and optimizing our statistical model to better reflect known variables such as location, experience, education and performance. This helps us more accurately demonstrate how different factors contribute to pay and how those contributions may differ across levels and competencies. We acknowledge that this work will continue to evolve and that we’ll always have more to do to deepen our understanding and implement plans across lines of service and levels within our business.

Reinforced our near-term net-zero targets while adhering to our 50% emissions cap: PwC has made a worldwide commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions with 2030 goals. The PwC network will also work with our clients to support their efforts, contribute to public policy developments in support of net-zero goals and decarbonize our own operations and supply chain through near-term targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). To reduce impacts today, PwC will offset emissions through high-quality carbon credits, transitioning to 100% carbon removals by fiscal year 2030.

As part of our efforts to ensure personal and business accountability within Canada, we've implemented new controls when booking travel to help us mitigate emission increases from flights. We didn’t breach our 50% cap on business travel emissions during our 2024 fiscal year due to actions we took to embed carbon budgets into each of our lines of service, and we maintained our focus on spending more time with our clients in the market when we do travel. We also utilized new technologies to support our carbon modelling and used location-based inputs to improve accuracy. These new approaches have supported better predictive emissions insights for our planned activities and enabled us to understand trade-offs and proactively manage business initiatives.

PwC’s latest Net Zero Economy Index reinforced the importance of driving progress against targets, providing a stark illustration of the growing divergence between the global ambition to tackle climate change and the reality of current progress. Our analysis showed that all nations–including governments and businesses–need to work harder to decrease emissions to stand any chance of meeting the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2030 deadline to reduce them by 43%, with a 78% reduction in carbon intensity now required in less than seven years.

Exceeded our goal to digitally upskill at least 2 million Canadians a year ahead of target: Our investments of time and resources to empower our people to contribute their skills and capabilities through our social impact programs helped us exceed our target a year ahead of schedule, reaching over 2.1 million cumulative beneficiaries through our digital upskilling programs. In addition to our pro bono investments, our people contributed more than 25,000 volunteer hours last year to support experiences like technology upskilling workshops for not-for-profits and social and micro enterprises; coaching new entrants to the job market; and mentoring individuals to help them develop skills in science, technology, engineering and math. Here are three examples to share:

• Women in Capital Markets (WCM): Our women-led engagement team developed a series of training modules focused on equity, diversity and inclusion; sponsorship; psychological safety; unconscious bias; and supporting flexibility in the workplace. Since the project’s inception three years ago, we have reached more than 150,000 financial services leaders in support of WCM’s vision.
• Alloprof: Our team developed a new strategic plan and financial model to help this Montreal-based francophone charity take advantage of new digital capabilities. Our work included the development of new AI solutions to help enhance the user experience, reach and impact of Alloprof's programs and services, which the charity implemented and scaled over the last two years to directly and indirectly reach more than 1 million teachers, students and parents across Canada. More information on our calculation methodology can be found within the KPI table.
• United Way’s Inclusive Local Economic Opportunity Initiative (ILEO): The United Way’s ILEO initiative is a unique work model that brings together the private, public and community sectors to develop solutions to address systemic disadvantages faced by priority neighborhoods and promote inclusive social and economic growth. We supported the development of an overarching measurement and evaluation framework for the initiative as well as a small-business incubator to help scale up local businesses and hired 54 local residents across the firm’s lines of service to offer meaningful work experiences. We also worked with local, diverse suppliers to procure several art installations as part of our broader responsible procurement efforts.

Continued to deepen our economic impact: As part of our focus on paying our fair share of tax and helping build a stronger and more resilient economy for all, we work with our Canadian economics and policy practice each year to quantify our direct, indirect and induced economic impacts. This year, our contributions to Canada’s gross domestic product, labour income and government tax revenue continued to increase. Our job growth contributions decreased slightly as we reimagined our business model, reflecting new investments that were made to transform our services and keep pace with the competitive demands in the market.