Month: September 2023

We broke new ground when we first began publicly reporting our sustainability performance in the mid-1990s. Twenty-eight years later, our Report on Sustainability and its companion publication, the Climate Report, continue the practice of disclosing our progress in more than a dozen areas of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Read more on our ESG progress in our reports .

Partnering with Indigenous communities is foundational to successful energy development. 

Our approach

We seek to build authentic, meaningful and mutually beneficial relationships with Indigenous Peoples. We have agreements with a number of Indigenous communities near our operations. These agreements reflect how we work together on a range of matters from project consultation to realizing the benefits of commercial and business opportunities, as well as supporting skills, employment and training programs.

All employees and contractors, as well as our joint venture partners, are responsible for following our policies. Our Chief Executive Officer is accountable to the Board of Directors for ensuring the Stakeholder Relations and Indigenous Relations policies are implemented.

We are guided by the reconciliation framework outlined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and work to apply its principles in our activities involving Indigenous Peoples, their land and resources. We are also informed and guided by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.

We also measure and report our performance against the Mining Association of Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining Indigenous and Community Relationships Protocol.

Journey of Reconciliation

The Journey of Reconciliation reflects the continued transformation within our organization and in our relationships with Indigenous Peoples. It represents our commitment to learn about Indigenous culture and history with open hearts and minds, to expand our perspectives, and build genuine relationships with Indigenous Peoples based on mutual trust and respect. Through this Journey of Reconciliation, Suncor aspires to progress the way we think and act to learn and better understand Indigenous perspectives and reflect Indigenous knowledge in what we do. We work to recognize the impacts of Suncor’s operations on Indigenous communities and incorporate that knowledge into our business activities.

Reconciliation is critical to healing and deepening relationships with Indigenous Peoples. We are taking an active and meaningful role as outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission call to action #92. We believe it is the right thing to do from a societal and business standpoint. Including Indigenous perspectives brings about innovation and different ways of approaching our work. Building strong relationships with Indigenous communities earns the trust and respect of true partners that helps propel our business and navigate the ever-changing landscape.

The Journey of Reconciliation is fundamental to our purpose. It supports our strategy of becoming a leader in sustainability and the energy transition. Read more on how we are building trust and respect with Indigenous Peoples .

Partnering with Indigenous business and communities

It starts with open and honest relationship building to understand common interests and how we can partner together for mutual benefit. Meaningful participation requires the ability to understand each other’s desired outcomes, strengths and limitations.

When it comes to our supply chain, our Indigenous Business Participation Strategy supports sourcing activity across the company. Working with local Indigenous businesses provides close and reliable talent and services. It also supports companies to invest revenues back into their communities.

In 2022, we spent approximately 27% more with Indigenous suppliers than in 2021.Twenty percent of our overall spending – worth approximately $3.1 billion – was with Indigenous suppliers. This was achieved by focusing on increased engagement and new relationships with suppliers that were established over the past few years. Doing business with Indigenous suppliers is embedded in our way of working, which is why we no longer set an annual spending target.Suncor’s work with Indigenous communities also remains strong through our Petro-Canada™ business. As of 2022, we have 63 Petro-Canada™ branded retail stations and wholesale marketing arrangements with First Nation and Métis communities. Not only do the retail stations service the community, but, in some instances, they act as a place for community members to gather.

Strengthening Indigenous workforce and inclusion

We want Suncor to be an inclusive and diverse work environment where everyone feels valued and respected. We believe this supports strong business performance, differentiates us in our communities and helps us to attract and retain Indigenous employees who want to build meaningful careers for the long term. Based on data from voluntary self-identification, as of 2022, Suncor has 923 Indigenous employees, which is 5.4% of our workforce.

Journeys, Suncor’s Indigenous employee inclusion network, plays an important role in supporting Indigenous employees to feel a sense of safety, pride and belonging within the company. Journeys has been pivotal in creating deep connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous employees. The network hosts numerous events and cultural experiences throughout the year, including medicine harvests, sharing circles and Indigenous Awareness Week events, inspiring employees to learn and take actions in reconciliation.

We have a Diversity, Talent and Sourcing Advisor, who manages all skills, employment and training for agreements with Indigenous communities. The advisor also works on initiatives such as training-to-employment programs in areas where we operate, and the Oil Sands Regional Workforce committee, led by the Oil Sands Community Alliance, to take a regional approach focused on mentorship and careers for youth in the Wood Buffalo region. The advisor is a resource to advise leaders and employees on Indigenous culture, protocols and knowledge and co-leads Journeys. Additional resources for Indigenous employees include the Indigenous Employee Mentorship Program, and Indigenous Programs for post-secondary students.

Partnering with Indigenous youth

Indigenous youth and their voices represent the future. The Indigenous Youth Advisory Council (IYAC) works with Suncor, the Suncor Energy Foundation (SEF), our Indigenous and Community Relations team and various senior leaders to listen, share, reflect and act on issues of mutual interest that are affecting Indigenous communities and the lives of Indigenous youth. It also supports young Indigenous leaders in developing their leadership potential while providing opportunities to participate in the energy system. IYAC further strengthened its relationships with leaders in 2021 through the formation of the IYAC Mentorship Program. The program focuses on reciprocal two-way mentorship between members of the SEF board and IYAC to support one-on-one human connections that are important for strengthening relationships.

Another way we partner with Indigenous youth is through postsecondary institutions across Canada. Since 2019, a member of Suncor’s Indigenous and Community Relations team in Sarnia, Ontario, has been part of a Lambton College planning committee designing an Indigenous Outdoor Gathering Space for youth on campus. Indigenous members of the committee oversaw the entire process and provided valuable direction on the purpose and design of the space. Students at the college will use this space for ceremonies, learning and gathering year-round. It will also be a place where Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and members of the community can walk the reconciliation path together.

Energized by Edison

By Casey Wian

The Chemehuevi Indian Tribe operates a casino, hotel and marina resort facility on the California side of the Colorado River and Lake Havasu. For many years, the tribe has endured more than its share of power outages because of its location at the end of a small-capacity circuit.

Brian McDonald is the tribe’s vice-chairman. He credits Southern California Edison with improving service reliability in recent years. Still, the Chemehuevi tribe, like many of the 13 federally recognized, sovereign tribal nations SCE serves within its 50,000-square-mile service area, is looking for ways to secure an uninterrupted supply of electricity for its members.

“Where we live, it can get to be 125 degrees. If you lose power, that’s a serious situation for our community,” McDonald said. “We are working on several renewable energy projects, including battery backups and a solar-powered microgrid.”

Eventually, the Chemehuevi hope to produce enough power where they can sell electricity back to California’s electric grid.

SCE President and CEO Steve Powell met with the Chemehuevi and other tribes recently at the 2023 Tribal Leaders Clean Energy Summit held at the Pala Band of Mission Indians’ hotel and casino in northern San Diego County.

“It was great to hear from the tribes, the challenges they are going through, their interests in clean energy, what energy sovereignty means for them and some of the limitations and challenges they have partnering with us,” Powell said. “They have such a strong willingness to collaborate and figure out how we can partner to create a cleaner energy future.”

“One thing we cherish is our sovereignty,” said Anthony Ravago Sr., vice chairman of the Pala tribe. “We are a group that doesn’t like to change very fast because of what has been taken from us in the past. But our hearts are open to you. With this renewable energy, we will survive and thrive.”

In 2021, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians and SCE reached a landmark agreement allowing the utility to complete its West of Devers transmission line project, which passed through the tribe’s land. The Morongo co-own the transmission lines with SCE, marking the first time a tribal nation has partnered with an investor-owned utility.

Now the tribe is considering adding large-scale battery storage on their land.

“We’re all dealing with the same issues. We want to be self-sufficient and be leaders in clean energy,” said Brian Lugo, a member of the Morongo Tribal Council. “The best way we can take care of our people is with a healthy business model, and that business model is dependent on the grid. If we can get clean energy from a consistent source, we’re going to be really happy.”

Addressing the tribal leaders at the summit, SCE’s Powell identified employment opportunities as another area where SCE and the tribes can work together for their mutual benefit.

“We’re going to need a big workforce that is skilled and diverse to take on the jobs side of the clean energy transition,” Powell said. “We have our Edison International Lineworker Scholarship program that is focused on bringing under-represented talent into the lineworker trade.”

Powell noted that for the first time this year, two of the $25,000 scholarship winners are Native American.

For more information about SCE’s service to tribal communities, visit sce.com/partners/partnerships/Tribal-Communities.

Originally published on bloomberg.com

Many Bloomberg engineers are active consumers, community participants, contributors, and leaders of various open source projects. Over the first half of 2023, Bloomberg’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and its engineers have come together to build, maintain, develop, and fund open source projects. These activities range from filing new commits, contributing pull requests, developing and publishing tools and features, being appointed to and/or sponsoring leadership roles, launching the Bloomberg FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Contributor Fund, and more. The Bloomberg team also regularly promotes its use cases for these projects and its efforts to advance open source technologies through numerous conference presentations, podcast interviews, and media engagements.

Our long track record of embracing open source is an investment in the future of these technologies. Our goal: to keep the open source ecosystem secure, resilient, and healthy as more and more users and companies rely on open source to keep their systems running.

Here is a roundup of Bloomberg’s open source engagement during the first half of 2023.

Contributions and Projects

Ceph: Bloomberg’s Distributed Storage team had its first major commit accepted in upstream Ceph; their PR fixed a major bug with race condition in multisite during full sync involving deletes.Hera: A new version (v5) of Dyno’s open source project Hera was released in collaboration with Bloomberg and AI Software Engineer Sambhav Kothari. This release expanded Hera to feature parity with workflows and events.Lexical: Several Bloomberg engineers have been contributing to this popular JavaScript Text Editor Framework that powers the Bloomberg Terminal. Between them, Attila Novak, Ben Carleton, Ebad Salehi, Ivaylo Pavlov, and Shubhanker Srivastava have landed 20 PRs in the first half of 2023 to improve core functionality.Memray: Memray 1.8.0 was published, and it includes a groundbreaking feature: temporal flame graphs. These provide a new perspective on memory usage in programs with dynamic time range analysis. No more static snapshots; explore memory allocation over time!MiniLMv2: Bloomberg’s AI researchers published “MiniLMv2.BB,” an open source implementation of the MiniLMv2 method detailed in the ACL 2021 paper “MiniLMv2: Multi-Head Self-Attention Relation Distillation for Compressing Pretrained Transformers.” Using this code, one can distill NLP language models, including BERT or RoBERTa, to a smaller size in order to enable lower latency inference.Network Transport Framework (NTF): Bloomberg’s engineers published an open source version of its NTF on GitHub. This collection of asynchronous networking APIs/libraries is designed for sending and receiving data between processes in scalable, high-performance applications.PyStack: Bloomberg’s Python Infrastructure team published PyStack, an open source debugging tool that can inspect the stack frames of a running Python process or core file to determine what is happening without having to understand CPython internals. [read more about PyStack]TypeScript: Bloomberg’s JavaScript Infrastructure team continues to collaborate with the core TypeScript team to improve the language and tooling. Chi Leung helped modernize namespaces and Leo Elmecker-Plakolm introduced types for an ES2023 feature. There is also exciting progress on experiments to speed up type-checking via parallel builds.Ecma TC39: Bloomberg contributes to governance, maintenance, and technical advancement of the JavaScript language. Daniel Ehrenberg is Ecma Vice President and Rob Palmer is Co-Chair of TC39. Software Engineer Ashley Claymore introduced the Await Dictionary proposal. Peter Klecha advanced the Promise.withResolvers() proposal to Stage 3. The Symbols as WeakMap keys and Change Array by Copy features are part of ES2023 thanks to Bloomberg engineers.V8: Bloomberg’s ongoing collaboration with Igalia has led to significant wins for the developer experience via contributions to Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. Memory debugging via Heap Snapshots was optimized to be 2x-100x faster. Advanced native profiling on Windows using ETW tracing was enabled to show both native and JavaScript function names.

Community Engagement

Joined the Adoptium Working Group as an Enterprise Member (and also became a Contributing Member of the Eclipse Foundation) [read more].Hosted Ceph Days NYC at its 120 Park Avenue office, where Nathan Hoad of our Storage Engineering team talked about why Bloomberg built a “Message-Driven Telemetry System At Scale” for our Ceph clusters. Our Head of Storage Engineering Matthew Leonard offered the opening remarks. [watch videos of all the Ceph Day NYC talks]Sponsored the NYC++ Meetup, which provides an opportunity for the area’s C++ enthusiasts to socialize, network, and learn together.Launched a new FOSS Contributor Fund, through a partnership between Bloomberg’s OSPO and Corporate Philanthropy teams, to support the people and communities who maintain open source projects. The fund will run a quarterly election to award up to three grants of $10,000 during each voting cycle. In Q1 2023, the first three projects to receive grants from the Fund were Apache Arrow, Celery, and Curl. The Q2 2023 grant recipients are MkDocs, OpenSSH, and PostgreSQL.Sponsored the Python Software Foundation’s hiring of a full-time Deputy Developer-in-Residence to accelerate the velocity of the CPython core dev team. [learn more about the role]Pradyun Gedam, an engineer with our Python Infrastructure team, was promoted to CPython core dev. He’s been active in the Python packaging ecosystem since 2017, and works on pip, PyPI, PyPA, Sphinx, TOML, and more. [learn more about Pradyun on Mouse Vs. Python]

Conference Sightings

Watch some of the many talks Bloomberg’s engineers delivered at conferences around the globe in the first half of 2023.

ACCU Conference 2023

Removing Needless Undefined Behavior for a Safer C++ | Alisdair MeredithManaging External API’s in Enterprise Systems | Peter MuldoonRust for the Recalcitrant C++ Programmer | CB BaileyImproving Compilation Times: Tools & Techniques | Vittorio RomeoC++ Trivial Relocation Through Time | Mungo GillHow Bloomberg uses Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) to Test Distributed Systems | Jacqueline PanMonads in Modern C++ | Georgi Koyrushki & Alistair FisherIntroduction to Epoch-Based Memory Reclamation | Jeffrey MendelsohnFunction Contracts in Practice using C++ | Rostislav KhlebnikovWhat I Learned from Sockets: Applying the Unix Readiness Model When Composing Concurrent Operations in C++ | Filipp GelmanImplementing a C++ Coroutine Task from Scratch | Dietmar Kühl

Berlin Buzzwords 2023

No Mean Feat: Upgrading a Customized Solr to Upstream Solr | Shikhar Srivastava

Cephalocon 2023

Ceph Multi-Site at Scale: Bloomberg’s Disaster Recovery Journey | Krunal Chheda and Jane ZhuOver a Billion Requests Served per Day: Ensuring Everyone Is Happy with Our Ceph Clusters’ Performance | Nathan Hoad and Alex WojnoDay 2 Keynote: The Road to Open Source Ceph: Bloomberg’s Enterprise Ceph Journey | Matthew LeonardEmbracing Ceph: Key Factors Driving Companies to Adopt Ceph Storage Solutions (Panel) | Matthew Leonard

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023

Customizing Your Buildpacks Build – Yes You Can! | Bloomberg’s Aidan Delaney and VMWare’s Natalie ArellanoThe State and Future of Cloud-Native Model Serving | Bloomberg’s Dan Sun and Amazon’s Theofilos Papapanagiotou

Open Source Summit North America 2023

What Our OSPOs Have Learned About Measuring Project Health | Alyssa Wright

OpenInfra Summit Vancouver 2023

The Tortoise Beats the Hare: Upgrading the Operating System of the Cloud at Scale | Jin Geng and Tyler StacheckiThe OpenInfra Foundation named Bloomberg winner of the 2023 Superuser Awards, recognizing its adoption of and contributions to Linux, OpenStack, Ceph, and Kubernetes infrastructure. The Superuser Awards recognize organizations who use open infrastructure to improve their business while also contributing back to the open infrastructure community.

PyCon US 2023

Automate Documentation with Sphinx & GitHub Actions (Tutorial) | Olga Matoula and Aya ElsayadAn async Python web framework with a Rust runtime | Sanskar JethiThe wheelhouse of horrors | László Kiss KollárHow memory profilers work | Pablo Galindo SalgadoPython & Bloomberg: An Open Source Duo | Mario Corchero, Bernat Gabor, Pradyun Gedam, László Kiss Kollár, Pablo Galindo Salgado, and Matt Wozniski

In The Media

CppCast podcast

Episode 362: Modules and build systems (Daniel Ruoso)Episode 363: Contracts (Joshua Berne)

The Changelog podcast: How companies are sponsoring OSS (Alyssa Wright)

OSPOlogy: How OSPOs Manage Change In Enterprises For Open Source Adoption (Alyssa Wright)

TODO Group | OSPOlogy: OSPOs Fostering FOSS Sustainability Through Effective Collaborative Funding (Alyssa Wright)

Talk Python To Me podcast

Episode #406: Reimagining Python’s Packaging Workflows (Pradyun Gedam)Episode #419: Debugging Python in Production with PyStack (Pablo Galindo Salgado & Matt Wozniski)

TechTarget: Sidecarless eBPF service mesh sparks debate (Andrey Rybka)

The New Stack

Will JavaScript Become the Most Popular WebAssembly Language? (Daniel Ehrenberg and Rob Palmer)New JavaScript features coming in ES2023 (Daniel Ehrenberg and Rob Palmer)What’s Next for JavaScript: New Features to Look Forward to (Daniel Ehrenberg and Rob Palmer)Beyond Browsers: The Long-term Future of JavaScript Standards (Daniel Ehrenberg and Rob Palmer)