CBERN aims to promote knowledge sharing and partnerships within the field of business ethics and across private, governmental, voluntary and academic sectors.

The objective of the CBERN Western Hub is to contribute to defining and building the critical mass necessary to integrate ethics into strategic organizational decision-making and actions. CBERN Western focuses on the private sector and community engagement through facilitating dialogue and partnerships between all relevant groups concerned with organizational ethics and sustainability.

Key Opportunities and Challenges
Worldwide enterprise functions on an unprecedented scale and scope leading to widening number of ethical dilemmas. Those dilemmas have consequences. As multiple corporate failures have demonstrated, when leaders of large institutions, public or private, ignore the values of the communities with which they interact, they create extreme risk for the institution itself, the communities and many other stakeholders. Ever more restrictive, hasty, and costly regulation attempts to correct the problem with dubious results. All of the above makes effective management of ethical issues fundamental to the productive operation of free enterprise in the service to the organization itself and all humankind as an upshot.

To date, corporate response to arising ethical issues and community activism has been reactive, evasive, and resistant at worst - or sporadic and uncoordinated at best. A plethora of entirely new, expensive and ungainly compliance regimes and departments have emerged. The cost has been staggering; but, since future issues are unpredictable and volatile, the effect is mixed (e.g. the global financial crisis occurred despite Sarbanes Oxley implementation).

Enterprise Ethics can integrate these initiatives into a comprehensive, recognized, and cogent programs for the explicit identification and proactive management of ethical matters at every level. These programs should focus on fostering and monitoring a healthy enterprise culture through the core anticipatory, evaluation, and action processes and controls; leading to the discovery and correction of any gaps in the overall practice.

Western Region Hub Projects:

Benchmarking Project
Currently, organizations have little information available on the state of ethics practice in Canada as a tool to benchmark or develop their own practices. Efforts are needed to develop training and capacity building in applied Enterprise Ethics that incorporate benchmarking, emerging and revised management approaches, trends, and ethical issues.The goal of this project is to develop and distribute a benchmarking survey, then analyze and disseminate the results. It will be completed in collaboration with EPAC.

Professional Associations Dialogue Project:
Enterprise ethics is about institutional behaviour. It is about the need to engage, internalize and manage culture and values both within the organization itself and its external interactions. Not a written policy, but a working system that permeates all structures and functions of a resilient modern enterprise. This project aims to engage the main functional professional associations into a facilitated dialogue on the role of ethics in an organization and how it could be integrated into its culture and structure. The results of the dialogue will then be captured and disseminated.