Industry Canada promotes sustainable development as part of its mandate to create the foundation for a more productive, competitive, knowledge-based economy.  The promotion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an important component of this overarching objective and can help to support other policy priorities including improving Canada's innovation performance, employment growth, and income growth.

Corporate social responsibility is a concept with a growing currency within Canada and around the globe. CSR is a concept that frequently overlaps with similar approaches such as corporate sustainability, corporate sustainable development, corporate responsibility, and corporate citizenship. While CSR does not have a universal definition, many see it as the private sector’s way of integrating the economic, social, and environmental imperatives of their activities.  As such, CSR closely resembles the business pursuit of sustainable development and the triple bottom line.  In addition to integration into corporate structures and processes, CSR also frequently involves creating innovative and proactive solutions to societal and environmental challenges, as well as collaborating with both internal and external stakeholders to improve CSR performance.

CSR has a wide range of potential meaning and the first module of this site addresses the issue of definition as well the nature of the challenges calling for public and private sector action on the CSR front.

The second module outlines tools that can be employed by businesses and other organizations to review and potentially enhance their performance with respect to CSR.

The third module recognizes salient best practices on the part of industry to achieve positive and proactive results on CSR.

The fourth module of the site provides an overview of Industry Canada’s activities and initiatives that support the promotion of corporate social responsibility and that define and provide pragmatic viewpoints on the linkages between CSR and innovation.

The final module presents some salient supplementary information and links that are available to the web visitor for the further exploration of CSR.