CORCORAN …

Oilsands tempest in a coffee cup.

The good news for Tim Horton’s is that Alberta isn’t a coffee-growing region, in which case the fast-food chain might today be forced to boycott its own products. According to The Sustainable Business Toolkit, coffee is “the world’s second most tradeable commodity after oil.” The question from SBT is: “Have you ever stopped to think what impacts the world’s favourite beverage is having on our planet?”

Advice to Tim Hortons’ senior executives in charge of corporate social responsibility: Don’t try to find the answer to that question. According to SBT, the world’s major coffee-growing regions are also home to some of the most delicate ecosystems on Earth and “the potential for serious damage is great.” In view of the planetary threat from coffee, Tims might have to suddenly send out a tweet to customers saying: “Thank you for your feedback and the product known as coffee is no longer available at Tims.”

But Alberta is an oil region, rather than a coffee nation, o the coffee-and-doughnuts chain last week was manipulated into announcing that it would stop running oil-related Enbridge commercials on in-store video screens in some of its locations — presumably because the threat of oil to the planet is greater than the threat of coffee. The Enbridge commercials ran in Tim outlets from B.C. to Ontario. They promoted good consumer energy practices, not the oilsands.

The campaign was actually organized by a group called SumOfUs, a subsidiary of a giant network of well-funded activists who make a living harassing corporations and Canada’s oilsands companies (see Vivian Kraus’s commentary below). SumOfUs, based in New York, orchestrated a tweet and Web campaign urging Tim Hortons to drop the Enbridge commercials. Then, it claimed success. “VICTORY! Thanks to over 28,000 members of the SumOfUs community (and counting!) who came together to demand that Tim Hortons pull its advertising campaign with Enbridge, they listened and just pulled the ads! Thanks for all you do!”

Apparently all it takes to move Tim Hortons is 28,000 people sending tweets and signing online petitions. Among the tweeters was Margaret Atwood.

Another tweet came from Faisal Moola, a University of Toronto ecologist and Ontario director general for the David Suzuki Foundation. On May 31, Moola tweeted: “@TimHortons I do not want #tarsands with my morning cuppa joe. I’m quitting you till you dump #enbridge Ads.”

Five days later, on June 4, Moola along with others who had tweeted the coffee chain, received a response: “@faisal_ moola We value your feedback and the Enbridge advertisements are not longer airing on Tims TV.” The commercials had been running for three weeks and were scheduled to end at the end of this week.

Exactly who sent out this tweet and under what authority is not known. Tims’ PR apparatus has not returned phone calls or emails. No response either from Carol Patterson, senior director, sustainability and stakeholder relations, whose phone-answering message on Monday, June 8, said, “Please note I will be away from the office until Monday, June 8. At that time I will be happy to re- turn your call.”

Not that happy, apparently. Patterson, by coincidence, plays a starring role in the cover story on the just-released summer issue of Corporate Knights magazine, which ranked Tim Hortons at the top of the magazine’s list of 50 Best Corporate Citizens. The ranking is based on a bizarre and impenetrable rating system, although Tim Hortons appears to have made the list “due to a strong tax payment score” and other factors such as its energy, carbon, water and waste “productivity” scores.

Corporate Knights bills itself as “The Magazine for Clean Capitalism,” although its idea of capitalism is an economy made up of corporations chasing after ideological pressures mounted by anticapitalist activists through social media. At Tim Hortons, the clean capitalism job falls to Patterson, who recently released the company’s annual Sustainability and Responsibility Report, which “continues to outline how Tim Hortons is Making a True Difference for individuals, communities and the planet.”

While coffee drinkers might be pleased to know they are making a difference to the planet, Tim Hortons now has a bit of a problem. If it can drop an oil company’s commercials following the “feedback” of 28,000 people, many of whom may not even patronize its outlets, at what point does it respond to the “feedback” of thousands of coffee drinkers who happen to disagree with the company’s decision to pull the plug on Enbridge?

The Corporate Knights article on Tims, by veteran business journalist Bernard Simon, raises a question about whether the company can stay at the top of the 50 Best Corporate Citizens list under new ownership. Tims was recently bought by Brazil’s 3G Capital Partners. Simon drags in a couple of corporate social responsibility academics to speculate that 3G Capital Partners might not be all the enthusiastic about the whole sustainability thing. They have, it seems, shut down the company’s sustainability operation. “In addition to jettisoning the dedicated sustainability team, the company appears to have also cut the budget for various corporate responsibility initiatives.”

If that’s true, it didn’t happen soon enough to save Enbridge’s commercials.

At what point does Tim Hortons respond to ‘feedback’ from customers who disagree?