Mr. Speaker, certainly not. The trustees of any pension plan have an obligation to bring the best rate of return possible. That is their fiduciary responsibility.
All I am saying is that there are secondary objectives and that the beneficiaries should have some input into how that money is invested because some of the pensioners may not want to be making money by clearing out the last rain forest in the world, or in a sweat shop in Nicaragua that is using child labour, or any number of those things. The seniors deserve to at least be able to say “Only invest in ethical investment funds”, which may or may not give a worse rate of return. Frankly, the ethical investment funds are doing very well.
I would never argue that we could be casual or cavalier about the investment practices but the employees, as in most private sector plans, deserve to have some say in the investment strategy of this huge pool of money.