Madam Speaker, I would like people to come back to the issue at hand because it is worthy of our interest and our comments. However, the comments of the member for Calgary East on the actual motion were so off the wall it is hard to know where to start.
This is RSP season and many Canadians are making the choice as to where to put their RSP investments. Many Canadians take the time to ensure that the money they have put away is done so in such a way that it is ethically invested. Those investments do not harm either people or the environment or whatever their particular interest is. Is the member aware that the Canadian government has no such scruples whatsoever?
This year $2.5 billion of our Canada pension funds were invested in corporations that manufacture the world's deadliest weapons, including missile launchers, incendiary bombs, battle tanks, high tech fighter aircraft, anti-personnel cluster munitions, warships, and even landmines, many of which are in use in the U.S.-led war in Iraq. Is he aware of that?
Would he also care to comment on the fact that the Canadian government has inadvertently conscripted us into war profiteering, whether we like it or not, as investors in the Canada pension plan?
Here are some of the weapons that we are investing in which are at work today in Iraq: the BGM-109 Tomahawk missile; the F-14A Tomcat fighter jet; the M3 “Bradley” assault vehicle; the Nighthawk stealth jet; the B-52 Stratofortress aircraft; and the M109A6 Paladin tank. The hon. member for Calgary East has shares in all of those weapons of mass destruction that are blowing the legs off children in Iraq as we speak.
The current Canada pension plan is specifically barred from taking into consideration anything other than maximizing for profit. The board is not allowed in its investment strategy to take into consideration whether those investments may be contrary to the wishes of Canadians, contrary to Canadian values, or even contrary to international conventions to which Canada has stipulated itself, such as the treaty on landmines put together by the former foreign affairs minister for the government at the time, the hon. Lloyd Axworthy. That treaty is something we are all proud of as a nation, yet this glaring contradiction exists that we are inadvertently investing in these things.
I raised only armaments as one issue. Our Canada pension plan also invests in pornography, tobacco and a number of other things that Canadians are against.
Seeing as the empirical evidence is such that you do not have to compromise a good rate of return to invest ethically, would he not reconsider his, I was going to say stupid, but his fatuous remarks about this motion?