As Canada’s Teck Resources eyes a US$53 billion tie-up with rival miner Anglo-American, Teck’s former general counsel and chief sustainability officer Charlene Ripley talks to Forward Law Review about her career so far – and the evolution of her understanding of corporate sustainability.
Teck Resources and Anglo American announced in September 2025 a landmark merger of equals to create Anglo Teck, a new mining giant headquartered in Vancouver. The merged company will be worth about US$53 billion and centred on copper, with the two businesses expecting to save hundreds of millions of dollars once fully integrated.
As Teck moves through this transformational deal, Charlene Ripley, the company’s general counsel and chief sustainability officer until late 2024, reflects on a career spent navigating exactly this kind of change. In this interview with Forward Law Review, Ripley discusses how her roles across Goldcorp, SNC-Lavalin and Teck have shaped her understanding of legal leadership, trust and ESG stewardship in high-risk industries.
Goldcorp
When Charlene Ripley joined Goldcorp as general counsel in 2013, she was barely a week into the role when she was thrown into a crisis that threatened the company’s flagship mine in Mexico.
“There was a dispute going on, unbeknownst to anyone in the corporate office,” she recalls. “We were faced with a situation where local surface rights holders were planning to take control of the mine because they allegedly held superior rights over the entire surface of the pit. It was mind-boggling.”
The legal battle consumed a significant amount of her time for about two years. “At the time, I didn’t even speak Spanish,” she adds. “My primary source of communication was an early clunky version of Google Translate.”
For Ripley, the experience crystallised the dangers of failing to invest in community engagement. “We learned the hard way how important it is to have strong, proactive stakeholder interaction before, during and after mine construction – it’s critical to have people on the ground who have a deep understanding of what’s important to local communities.”
It was one of many high-stakes episodes in a career that has spanned work in the energy, mining and engineering sectors. From Goldcorp’s mine disputes, through SNC-Lavalin’s corruption crisis, to a hostile takeover attempt at Teck Resources, Ripley has been in the legal engine room as general counsel, guiding companies through major crises while continually redefining her own understanding of corporate sustainability.
Her first senior legal appointment came in 1997. In 2003, she moved to Houston to become general counsel of Anadarko Petroleum. After a decade in the US, she returned to Canada in 2013 to join Goldcorp – and discovered how much had changed in her absence.
“When I came back to Canada after 10 years in the US, I was surprised by the changes – both in the legal profession and with respect to environmental and sustainability issues. Suddenly there was far greater recognition of Indigenous rights, land consultation and environmental expectations.”
At Goldcorp her remit was wide. “I had a very diverse portfolio: legal, human resources, ethics and compliance, internal audit, enterprise risk management and insurance all reported to me,” she explains. “There wasn’t a formal compliance programme, so we built that from scratch, and we also built a risk management framework from scratch.”
Despite those reforms, she found sustainability was still a low priority. “Before I left Canada, I hadn’t really heard of the word ‘sustainability’. When I came back, I started hearing about ‘ESG’ – but it was considered a soft issue. The price of gold had dropped significantly for a sustained period of time and mining companies were redirecting financial resources – often that meant ESG-related funding suffered.”
Ripley’s time at Goldcorp was also shaped by lessons about leadership alignment. “The key takeaway from my time there is where I really saw the importance of having a management team that has each other’s backs,” she says. “At the time, no one talked about psychological safety, but having that is so critical.”
Without it, she adds, companies stumble. “If you don’t have that kind of trust within the executive team, the entire company suffers.”
SNC-Lavalin
After Goldcorp was sold to Newmont Mining in 2019, Ripley was weighing her next move. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a GC again,” she says. But then came SNC-Lavalin – the embattled engineering giant facing corruption charges that threatened the viability of the company.
“I thought, if I was to take on another GC role, that would be the most interesting job in Canada,” she recalls. “And a month later, the headhunter called.”
SNC-Lavalin, once one of Canada’s engineering champions, became engulfed in scandal after revelations that it had paid millions in bribes to secure contracts in Libya between 2001 and 2011.
In 2015, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) laid corruption and fraud charges against the company. A conviction would have barred SNC from bidding on government contracts, threatening its survival, since public-sector work made up the bulk of its business.
The case spiralled into a national political controversy over deferred prosecution agreements, nearly toppling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
The company’s situation was stark. “If found guilty, SNC would have been debarred from doing business with government entities,” she explains. “That would have been the end of the company.”
She arrived in the middle of negotiations with prosecutors. “We ended up getting the deal done: a C$280 million penalty, a monitor (in addition to the two existing monitors) and a subsidiary that pled guilty to one count of fraud. It was quite remarkable,” she says. “After that settlement, the company could finally breathe again and focus on the business and rebuilding its reputation.”
The compliance overhaul was enormous. “At one point the compliance team had well over 100 people – many of whom were focused on investigations,” she said. “The company was combing through years of transactions to identify potential corruption while at the same time building a gold-standard compliance programme.”
SNC-Lavalin – since renamed AtkinsRéalis – also became the first company in Canada to secure a remediation agreement, similar to corporate deferred prosecution agreements used elsewhere. “In 2022, we negotiated the very first remediation agreement in Canada,” Ripley says. “It was an extremely interesting process – and quite ironic that it was SNC-Lavalin, given the previous political controversy after being denied in 2018 the opportunity to negotiate a remediation agreement.”
The lessons, for Ripley, were enduring. “The key takeaway from SNC is what can easily happen when companies take their compliance programmes and reputations for granted – and the insidious, long-term impact of corporate corruption. The horrible impact on employees and reputation. It can take years and years to recuperate – if ever.”
Teck
By 2023, Ripley was ready for a new challenge. Teck Resources, the Vancouver-based diversified miner, was widely respected for its ESG leadership. When the GC role opened, she leapt at the opportunity.
But within three months of Ripley joining the company, Teck was facing a surprise hostile C$25 billion takeover approach from Anglo-Swiss mining giant Glencore. “We were in crisis mode from April until November. I’ve never been under that kind of stress in my entire career.”
Her pride lies in the way the team responded. “The legal team was small, but incredibly talented. Everyone had each other’s backs. It was just so fluid and easy. I had never seen anything like it.” The team won the Best Canadian Department of the Year at the 2024 Canadian Law Awards – and it was well deserved.
The intensity was staggering: “We held over 40 board meetings in 2023. It was very intense.”
Teck’s board rejected the proposal as “unsolicited and opportunistic,” citing jurisdictional, ESG and execution risks. The bid sparked significant political and regulatory attention in Canada, prompting government scrutiny of foreign acquisitions in the critical minerals sector.
Support from government was decisive, Ripley says. “What was incredible during the Glencore bid was the support Teck received from all levels of government,” she recalls. “The Premier of British Columbia spoke out. Three Federal ministers signed a letter advising how important Teck was to Canada. This is extremely rare and it happened because of Teck’s strong reputation.”
Ultimately, however, Teck sold its steelmaking coal business to a Glencore-led consortium for about US$7 billion in 2024 – as the company sought to transition away from coal to focus on critical minerals.
Across all three companies, Ripley has witnessed a transformation in how sustainability is understood.
“From about 2013 to 2019, I really saw change in how mining companies were approaching ESG,” she says. “Teck Resources was always perceived as the industry leader – they had an integrated army of people dedicated to sustainability and the environment, while it was siloed and under-resourced at other mining companies.”
She also notes how legal departments have had to modernise. “The sophistication of legal operations in Canada is about 15 years behind the US,” she says. “At Goldcorp, SNC-Lavalin and later at Teck, I worked hard on modernising the legal department – this included leveraging technology, enhanced external counsel management, strategic cost management and people development.”
For general counsel, overseeing contract management and disputes is table stakes. Ripley says that, today, the role of the general counsel is really about being a strategy leader: developing and implementing a strategic lens in how legal services are provided. This is evident in the impact general counsel have on a company’s reputation and sustainability efforts.
“When I look back on my experience as a general counsel, one of the most remarkable things that I have witnessed the impact of corporate values on an organisation’s sustainability posture,” Ripley says. “Corporations who treat sustainability as a ‘soft issue’ do so at their peril. This is just as true in today’s environment as ever.”
Sustainability can be pragmatic, she says: it can drive profits – when companies do the right things for the right reasons.
She continues: “I have seen how sustainability makes an organisation resilient – allowing it to competitively remain on the front foot. And I believe it can also be said that corporations with an aligned leadership team driving a responsible, sustainable culture are usually the most successful.”
Looking back, Ripley sees a common thread through her career: crises reveal the fragility of corporate reputation and the importance of trust within leadership teams.
As she puts it: “Reputation is fragile, and you have to be proactive and strategic protect it.”