Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, members, for this opportunity.
First of all, I apologize that my voice is muffled. Yesterday I shouted too much against the Chinese embassy and the University of Ottawa.
I will be providing testimony on Canadian investments in the Uighur genocide today from the perspective of university funds. This is a reality across Canadian pension funds, university endowment funds and other organized funds, and it must be stopped.
There are enough reports that detail the complicity of Canadian federal pension funds as well as provincial pension funds in the Uighur genocide. These pension funds have directly or indirectly invested in companies that are tied up with the Uighur genocide, Uighur forced labour, construction of repressive infrastructure such as concentration camps and prisons, surveillance technology that is part of an integrated joint operational platform that is used for immediate identification and the arrest of Uighurs and others with ethno-religious profiles. Through investments in companies conducting surveillance of the Uighur diaspora, we are complicit in the transnational repression of more than 2,000 Uighur Canadians, our neighbours and friends.
Earlier this year, in March, two young undergraduate students from McGill University uncovered that $15 million of their school's $1.9 billion endowment fund was invested in the Uighur genocide through companies tied up in Uighur forced labour and surveillance. After we invested more time into finding matches for McGill's investment portfolio, we found that investments reached nearly $100 million. Some of the companies McGill invests in are directly linked to labour transfer programs in the Uighur region. They include mining companies. Others are involved with surveillance technology, like Alibaba, or a technology that controls smart prisons used to detain Uighurs, like Tencent. Some are sanctioned by the United States. They are still on the sanctions list.
This is likely not an isolated event. We suspect that all or most Canadian universities' investments are similarly complicit in the Uighur genocide. We are collecting additional research to expand this.
Meanwhile, students at McGill have mobilized and are urging their school to divest from companies implicated in the Uighur genocide and to change its investment portfolio to reflect the students' interests and commitments to protect their human rights.
We must also protect our country's principles and obligations. The Canadian Parliament recognized the Uighur genocide in February 2021. Widespread Uighur forced labour is undisputed. Since that time, Canada pension plan's investments in China have only grown.
This paradox can be seen throughout our government. As we release business advisories on Canadian companies and table forced labour legislation that will, at best, prevent goods being imported from the Uighur region, even if it is successful at that, we carry on making money off of our cowardly business relationship with China and deepen our business ties, despite warnings and statements by senior government officials.
Given the gravity and scope of this issue, the ongoing Uighur genocide and lack of action by the government, forced labour and the lack of enforcement by the CBSA, China's interference in Canada, and our public funds' heavy investments in companies tied to the UIghur genocide, we've come to believe that strong legislative action is needed more than ever to reflect, at least, senior government officials' statements on this matter.
It must be a painful moral bankruptcy for each and every one of us sitting here to receive a pension at some point in our lives tainted by the genocide we once condemned unanimously.
Thank you.