Madam Speaker, if the hon. parliamentary secretary is really interested in my views, he would not have used nine and a half minutes of the ten minutes allotted to questions and comments to ask the question. However, I will answer some of the things he raised.
In terms of ethical investment, I was not recommending we get into some kind of social engineering. I was not even directly recommending that we use the fund in any specific way to achieve secondary goals. I was raising the point that we do not want to encourage bad behaviour in terms of investing in negative things that some of us have strongly held views about such as off-shore sweat shops in some free economic trade zone.
Some of the funds that we might invest in that show an attractive rate of return could be in things that we would not tolerate on our own shores. Given the off-shore permission now of 30%, that is even more of a factor. That could happen without ethical guidelines. I do not think Canadians would like it if they knew it was happening. Specifically, the spokesperson for the CPPIB says that our legislation specifically prohibits us from engaging in any investment activities other than maximizing investment returns. This is exactly what the parliamentary secretary said, that the only criteria, the only objective, is the maximum rate of return.
That is a crude, outdated and obsolete view on investment these days because even as a trustee of a union pension fund many years ago, we started to take into consideration that there is more than one bottom line. Obviously we must get a reasonable rate of return and hopefully the maximum rate of return. However, we do not have to compromise that to have an ethical investor. That is what the empirical evidence shows, that sometimes the ethical investment funds outperform. Plus, if we did use any of those funds in our Canada pension plan fund for secondary goals, we would be limited in some plans to 10% of the actuarial surplus.
In other words, we do not gamble the actual body of the equity in the fund. The limit is 10% of the surplus that we can participate in those side issues. We should not be rolling the dice with the whole shebang on the stock market and losing billions of dollars, which we are. The status quo is also not very good. No one would say that it is good to lose $1.5 billion per quarter. The only justification is that the CEO says that we did not lose as much as some other people because the stock markets have been bad lately. I am saying maybe we should not be there at all. Maybe the jury is not in as to whether we should be rolling the dice with the future of retirement funds of Canadians.