Sustainability is now a procurement gating factor in Canada: HP’s Frances Edmonds on what that means for MSPs

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last sixteen years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show.

We talk a lot on this show about the “how” of the channel — how to build a practice, how to manage a migration, how to secure a client. Today we’re looking at a different kind of how: how to win deals in an environment where your customers care as much about your carbon footprint as they do about your hourly rate.

My guest today has been living this story for 30 years. Frances Edmonds is the Head of Sustainable Impact at HP Canada, and she’s one of the most recognized voices in the country when it comes to the intersection of technology and sustainability. HP’s own data shows that over 70% of partners who lead with sustainability are seeing measurable impact on their win rates.

What does that actually look like for a Canadian MSP in 2026? We’re going to dig into the shift in procurement rules, including some hard numbers on ESG weighting in Canadian bid documents, and why the rise of Edge AI might actually be the biggest sustainability story of the year for the channel.

Let’s get right into it — my chat with Frances Edmonds.

Frances, thanks for taking the time.

Frances Edmonds: You’re very welcome.

Robert Dutt: You sit in a unique place in that you’ve been focused on sustainability for a while now — long before it was a mainstream business conversation. Can you give us the quick picture of what your role is at HP Canada today, and how that has evolved as the story has evolved over time?

Frances Edmonds: Sure. My title today is Head of Sustainable Impact — that’s the name of our sustainability program. And I practice what I call CSR 2.0: corporate social responsibility 2.0.

I spent the first half of my career really getting HP Canada to the point where we could call ourselves Canada’s most sustainable technology company — you can find all the proof of that at hp.ca/sustainableimpact. Then we took a look around and said: sustainability from a business context in Canada isn’t really advancing. We’ve got a few leaders, but the vast majority of Canadian businesses aren’t doing very much — including our channel.

So we thought: how do we change that? In a capitalist economy, the demand signal for sustainability performance in suppliers comes at the ballot box of procurement. About eight years ago, we switched our strategy to focus on how do we change how Canada buys. That’s really my job today — to encourage everyone in the industrial economy to add sustainability into their procurement criteria and decision-making, so there’s an incentive for all companies to step up and do more.

Robert Dutt: Is that all?

Frances Edmonds: [laughs] Well, on top of all the other things we do to maintain being Canada’s most sustainable technology company. But I don’t do this alone — sustainability is a team sport. We require all players to come to the table and bring their relative strengths.

One thing we’re doing right now: we’re onto our fourth cohort working with a nonprofit called CBSR, Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. We teach sustainability professionals at some of Canada’s largest companies — Walmart, Canadian Tire, the banks, insurance companies — how to work alongside their procurement teams to implement sustainable procurement. We partner with nonprofits like Green Economy Canada, CBSR, other industry associations, and customers and partners to drive the change that’s necessary.

Robert Dutt: You mentioned there’s still a need to mature how organizations across Canada are approaching this. The Amplify Impact data shows that 70-plus percent of partners report winning new business by leading with sustainability — that’s a striking number. When a Canadian MSP or reseller is actually leading with sustainability in a sales conversation, what does that look like in the room?

Frances Edmonds: It really depends on who the customer is. Some customers have sustainability goals, but the people the MSP is actually talking to don’t know that — there’s often a gap between what the corporation is committed to and what the people doing the buying or the IT implementation are aware of.

So you have to do your research: understand where the customer is coming from, what the opportunity is, and then align what the MSP and the OEM are doing on sustainability with the customer’s actual pain points. Do they have difficulty managing products at end of first life — the most common issue? Do they understand where their security vulnerabilities are?

If you think about managing print, for instance — you’d normally do a print assessment and find printers 15 or 20 years old sitting on the network. That’s a huge security vulnerability that nobody’s really paying attention to. Helping customers with pain points like that — showing them the opportunities, whether it’s getting value back from end-of-first-life equipment to help fund new purchases, or moving into buying as a service — that’s really the sweet spot for both an MSP and a customer to maximize their sustainability performance.

Robert Dutt: Is this primarily a large enterprise and government discussion today, or is it moving into the mid-market and down into SMB? A lot of partners are working with smaller businesses who may not have a strong sustainability mandate at the top of their priority list.

Frances Edmonds: I think it’s quite spotty, honestly — I see bid documents from across the country in all sectors of the economy, so it’s hard to generalize.

One advantage small businesses have is that they’re often purpose-driven, and the owner can make a decision quickly. “I’m buying from a company that puts ocean-bound plastics into their products” — and that’s a faster decision than getting a university to change its procurement policy, which can take three years of approvals.

What I am seeing that’s changed over the eight years I’ve been working in this area: before, people didn’t really understand the link between sustainability and procurement. Today they understand it, and the people who want to do it differently often just have inhibitors in the way — or they default to “this product’s carbon footprint is two kilograms less, so I’ll buy it.” That’s not really how sustainable procurement works. You need more information to make a well-rounded decision.

Sustainable procurement is still about getting the best value for the goods and services you’re buying — but now you’re also looking at the most sustainable or circular option from the most sustainable or circular supplier, in alignment with your own organization’s goals. And governments, whose sustainability goals range from zero poverty to life below water and everything in between, have a tremendous opportunity to practice this.

Robert Dutt: You’ve spoken before about sustainability scoring in RFPs and procurement documents. Where does that stand in Canada right now — is this something MSPs need to be ready for today, or is it still a coming wave?

Frances Edmonds: There’s always opportunity for competitive advantage because each customer has a different focus — whether it’s bridging the digital divide in Indigenous communities, disability inclusion, or a dozen other areas.

But let me give you some numbers. The Canadian Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement just issued their latest annual report. They represent broader public sector organizations with $105 billion in combined spend. Twenty-seven members have sustainable procurement embedded in their policies. Fourteen have a dedicated full-time person working on it.

And one of the best examples to date: OECM, the Ontario Education Collaborative Marketplace, publicly states that they’re applying a 12% weighting for environmental, social, and governance items in bid documents — scored at not just the OEM level, but at the channel partner level as well.

Robert Dutt: So if I’m a partner who wants to get ahead of this — with so many angles and approaches to consider — what’s the minimum literacy they need to have in a procurement conversation today? What should they know cold?

Frances Edmonds: The universal language is carbon. What are your carbon emissions? How are you working to reduce your carbon impact? That question is coming in some form from customers, regardless of sector.

We know our products are carbon-intensive: 80% of a notebook computer’s carbon impact is determined before it ever reaches the customer — it’s in how it’s built. So understanding where carbon sits in the system, and how customers can help reduce it, is the first place to start.

Through the Amplify Impact Program, HP offers a wide range of training — from basic 101s all the way through to what we call Climate Fresk. That’s a three-hour workshop that helps a group understand the interconnectedness of climate change and what they can do about it. We deliver it to partner leadership so they can understand how important this is to their business. We’re actually running one next week, and partners are welcome to attend.

Robert Dutt: For a partner who’s hearing this and thinking “I’m interested, but where do I start?” — what are the tools and resources inside Amplify Impact that are actually moving the needle?

Frances Edmonds: The Amplify Impact Program basically took 80 years of HP’s expertise in sustainability leadership, put it into a web-enabled system, and made it available to partners for free. Everything a partner could possibly need is in there.

If you’re not in the program yet, I’d strongly encourage you to join — it’s free and straightforward to get started. You sign a pledge to commit to the program, then complete an online self-assessment. With AI enhancements, it benchmarks you against your peers worldwide and gives you a customized action plan to improve your scores.

The results have been meaningful: since we launched in 2021, self-assessment scores globally have increased by 59%. Partners redo the assessment annually, and we’re seeing steady progress. In Canada specifically, we’ve seen over 6,000 sustainability courses completed by partners and employees — which tells you the interest is there at the individual level.

For anyone outside the Amplify Impact Program, Dr. Bob Willard at Sustainability Advantage offers a whole suite of high-quality tools for free. That’s another strong place to start.

Robert Dutt: How has the partner conversation in Canada on this evolved over the last five years, and where does it need to go next?

Frances Edmonds: Let’s look at the economic situation partners are in today. Prices are going through the roof, availability is constrained. What does a logical customer do in those circumstances? They start thinking about buying for durability and longevity — and that leads right into the “as a service” conversation.

This is about deepening relationships with your customers. Customers don’t want a one-time fix anymore — they need a partner at the table. And selling as a service, with a longer and deeper customer relationship, is where the market is going. We’re moving away from selling boxes to selling services, and sustainability is just another one of those services that’s part and parcel of that shift.

I always think of security and sustainability as two sides of the same coin. That’s what customers need — and we can deliver both.

Robert Dutt: Security as a service is certainly well-established. Where do you see sustainability as a service in terms of maturity and adoption?

Frances Edmonds: Within the Amplify Impact Program, for instance, if a partner wants to measure and manage their carbon footprint, HP has negotiated a globally discounted rate for partners to acquire a software-as-a-service tool to do exactly that. They become carbon-literate in a hands-on way and understand how to report on it to their own stakeholders — employees, investors, customers, whoever.

In some cases, we even allow partners to use MDF to pay for that software. We’re essentially paying them to get started with carbon management.

Robert Dutt: I have to ask about AI — it’s the conversation everyone in the channel is having right now. There’s a real tension between the push to build AI infrastructure, which is enormously energy-intensive, and sustainability goals. How should partners be navigating that for their clients?

Frances Edmonds: Great question. Let’s start with the distinction between cloud AI and Edge AI.

Edge AI — which, in a country of small and medium businesses like Canada, is where AI is really going to drive productivity — is estimated to have greater than 90% lower carbon impact and to be more secure than cloud AI. So we’re already on a winner there, assuming we can get AI-enabled devices into the right businesses.

At its simplest: most tech people don’t actually know the relative carbon footprint of doing a Google search versus running a generative AI query. Can we just educate people to use the right tool in the right place? Don’t burn your carbon budget on something where a Google search would do.

When you get into the ethics of AI use broadly, that’s a much longer conversation — and I’d like to see a lot more guidance documentation coming out on that front.

Robert Dutt: That’s quite telling — that much lower footprint at the edge also speaks to what solution providers control, and brings in data sovereignty, security, many different factors.

Frances Edmonds: Exactly. Security is the other piece — and they really go hand in hand.

Robert Dutt: One last question: what’s the one thing you wish more MSPs and resellers understood about sustainability that they’re currently either getting wrong or overlooking?

Frances Edmonds: Even when partners have made real investments in becoming more sustainable — gone through the training, completed the program — I don’t think they’re maximizing that return on investment by actually selling with sustainability. And I think it often comes down to the people taking the education not being the people making the go-to-market decisions.

But as we see this shift into selling as a service, I think it will come along with it naturally. If you think about WXP — HP’s Workforce Experience Platform — there’s sustainability built right into it alongside security. The opportunity to delight customers with sustainability is real, and it’s not hard to do. It’s really just about making sure everyone knows, understands, and can connect it to what the customer actually needs.

Robert Dutt: Some great advice in there. I appreciate you taking the time to share where things stand and where you see them going.

Frances Edmonds: Thank you. From Canada’s most sustainable technology company — listed as one of the top 100 most sustainable corporations worldwide — this is near and dear to my heart. We’re here to make a difference, and this is one of the ways we do that.

Robert Dutt: Brilliant. And it’s a conversation HP Canada has been having consistently for a while now — so it’s clearly not just an Earth Month thing.

There you have it — Frances Edmonds from HP Canada.

I’d like to thank Frances for her time today. It’s rare to talk to someone who can bridge the gap between high-level environmental goals and the gritty reality of a municipal RFP response, and I think she gave us some real clarity on where that line is being drawn right now.

And as always, I’d like to thank you for listening.

My big takeaway from that conversation is that sustainability is becoming a hard technical requirement, much like security. When you hear that organizations like OECM are moving toward a 12% weighting for ESG in their procurement documents — that’s not a nice-to-have anymore. That’s a gating factor. If you’re an MSP and you aren’t literate in this space, you’re essentially spotting your competitors a 12-point lead before the conversation even starts.

I also found Frances’s point about Edge AI particularly striking. The idea that processing at the edge carries 90% less carbon impact than the cloud is a powerful narrative for partners — especially when you layer in the data sovereignty benefits we discussed. It’s a rare triple-win of performance, privacy, and planet that fits perfectly into the AI PC refresh cycle we’re seeing right now.

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Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.