An American journalist friend told me last week that a Canadian cannot understand what guns mean to his country any more than an American can understand what hockey means to ours.
Glibness aside, even if I feel good about his comparison of what we respectively value, it’s true we can be smug and pious when a country we largely envy seems deserving of a lecture. We got into that space in the last couple of weeks following yet another assault-weapon massacre, this one in a Florida school.
This time, though, the recurring lecture Canadians give Americans about firearms had its reverberations closer to home: Vancouver-based Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) had to determine if its corporate values might be corroded if it continued to be supplied products from a gun manufacturer with a long list of companies, Vista Outdoor Inc.
MEC does not carry guns, but it sells Bushnell binoculars, CamelBak water bottles and Bollé ski goggles, among other products of Vista companies. Several other outlets carry these goods in our market, but MEC’s four-decade operating ethos as a five-million-member co-op is near spiritual – responsible sourcing, minimal environmental footprint and a supply chain cognizant of human rights issues. In setting such standards it cannot afford to find them inconvenient to abide when it chooses.
The pressure that came its way in recent days hit with surprising intensity and velocity. A Change.org petition to separate MEC from Vista swiftly reached 50,000 signatures and counting, part of a movement successfully pressing businesses to reconsider relationships to the gun industry and the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) advocacy organization.
In the wake of Parkland, even Donald Trump appears to have at least one foot on a bandwagon about the NRA that includes Avis and Hertz, Delta and United Airlines, Allied and North American van lines, and MetLife. FedEx has yet to sever ties, and Amazon, YouTube and Apple are under pressure to stop streaming the NRA TV channel.
A Vista firm did not manufacture the gun that killed 14 students and three adults in Parkland, Florida, but a Vista subsidiary in Canada did make the gun that the Sandy Hook school shooter used to kill his mother on that horrible day in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012. Its subsidiary, Savage Arms, is a major manufacturer, and it is a strong supporter of the NRA.
Considering that many U.S. firms more rapidly cut their NRA ties, MEC’s handling of the dilemma in an age of viral social media seemed glacial – it took several days before it could state its intentions on March 1. It decided not to take Vista-related products off the shelves, but it won’t order any more once the supply is gone.
The question on whether to cut the cord might at first blush appear a MEC no-brainer, but the company had to wrestle with whether it wanted to assume a new corporate responsibility – what CEO David Labistour calls a consideration of “ownership structures” as it purchases.
This is one very slippery slope upon which to keep one’s footing, because corporate tentacles can lead into all sorts of treacherous waters. In a conglomerated world, ethical congruence is a true challenge.
MEC did the right thing by listening to its membership, but this won’t be the last petition. And as MEC makes decisions that limit its product line or its bottom line, bet the bank that down the street Vista products will remain at rival outlets that won’t think twice. Such is the price of ethical behaviour.
Labistour, a recipient at Business in Vancouver’s 2017 BC CEO Awards, is one of our more complex leaders: a former South African military lieutenant, a farm child versed in hunting, yet invested in the value of engagement above combat and immersed in the gentler, less violent elements of the outdoors.
He finds inspiration in the search-for-meaning work of the late Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, whose most famous quote is timely in considering the frenzy of the week for MEC and its CEO: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” •
Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president of Glacier Media.
