Mr. Speaker, the hon. member raised a recent and graphic demonstration of exactly the point I have been trying to make.
In my view what we consider bad behaviour on the part of a corporation should not be rewarded by investments from our Canada pension plan. This is the type of thing, were an ethical screen put in place, that the investment probably would have been screened out. Again, we would not screen out every oil company on the basis of that bad actor.
We would have what we call the best of sector strategy. We would look at the oil and gas sector, an area in which we may want to invest and should perhaps as the Canada pension plan, and invest only in the actors in that sector that were practising best practices, the highest ethical standard possible in that sector.
Hopefully this would be the carrot approach that other industry players would seek to elevate their standards so they could also attract the massive investment. We are talking about $100 billion in the near future. The only people to gain so far have been the stockbrokers who have yielded $500 million worth of brokerage fees for moving our money around.
I thank the member for his question. It is a legitimate recent example that I believe helps to make our case that we can and should be more selective and more careful in our strategy. I hope I have demonstrated by example that we do not have to compromise profitability in doing so. The empirical evidence is to the contrary. We can match or even in many cases surpass standard indexes through ethical investment strategies.