Madam Speaker, today I rise to address Bill C-231, which on the surface appears to be a noble attempt to direct our pension funds exclusively toward the common good, but the old adage is that the how is even more important than the what. The devil is in the details, and because the hon. member who proposes this bill is afraid of the devil he has avoided the details altogether in this bill.
The member proposes an amendment to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board Act that would create a new requirement, which states:
The investment policies, standards and procedures, taking into account environmental, social and governance factors, shall provide that no investment may be made or held in an entity if there are reasons to believe that the entity has performed acts or carried out work contrary to ethical business practices, including...
...the commission of human, labour or environmental rights violations...
What is meant by all of the terminology the member puts in but does not define? We do not know what is meant because the member does not tell us, nor does he provide us with an arbitrator anywhere in the Canadian system that would determine when any such business practices have been violated or when human labour or environmental rights have been in some way offended. He leaves it to our imagination to determine what he means by each of these terms.
With respect to ethical business practices, we know there are some members of the NDP who consider it unethical for businesses to run a profit at all. Excluding profitable businesses from the CPP's portfolio would guarantee impoverishment to Canadians who rely on the fund's returns in order to live out a dignified retirement.
Let us move on to additional criteria the member said would exclude a company from receiving CPP investments. These are environmental violations. The member has written that it would be a violation to invest in oil and gas companies. I am quoting him here when he laments, “the CPPIB is investing billions of your pension dollars into the oil and gas sector”, something he would presumably ban from happening if this bill were adopted. Our pension fund would be banned from investing in Canada's largest exporting industry: the oil and gas sector, which produces more jobs for indigenous Canadians than any other private sector industry. Our resource sector would be banned from receiving funds invested by our pension system at a time when Albertans are considering pulling out of the CPP altogether because of the fact they are demographically younger, and contribute more on a per capita basis, than the other eight provinces that are members of the fund. We are going to look Albertans in the eye and tell them they should stay in the CPP pension fund while that fund specifically bans its managers from investing in Alberta's biggest industry. What an insult to the men and women who have worked in that industry for so long and done so much good for our federation.
On the broader definition that the bill provides of “unethical business practices”, I reached out to the CPPIB and asked what kinds of companies in Canada would be banned from getting Canadian investment under this legislation. It said only the 10 biggest companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange, all 10 of them by valuation, would be banned from receiving investment from the CPPIB. These are companies such as Shopify, Enbridge and the Royal Bank. On a combined basis, these 10 companies, which employ literally millions of Canadians, would be banned from receiving investments from their very own pension fund.
Whether that was the member's intention, I do not know. In fact, I rather doubt it, but that is not important. Writing laws is like programming computers: The machine does what it is programmed to do. If the CPPIB is programmed to ban all of these entities from receiving investment, that is what the managers will be forced to do. In fact, if the principles in this bill were actually applied, I wonder whether the fund would even be able to buy bonds in the Canadian government. CPPIB said that it would only be allowed to buy bonds in the Canadian government if the bill passed. I do not think it would even be allowed to do that.
Let us think about it. The Liberal government cannot provide clean drinking water to first nations people, which violates human rights. Now, because of the incompetence of federal ministers who cannot keep their word and provide clean drinking water, the government itself might be banned from receiving bond investments from the CPPIB. The government violated its own environment promises. It has not planted a single tree. This could be perceived as an environmental violation. The government signed off on letting the City of Montreal pour millions of litres of raw sewage into our waters, which is another violation of environmental rights. Could we possibly buy bonds in the City of Montreal or the Government of Canada when such violations have occurred? Of course not.
Because of its poor drafting, this legislation, however well intentioned, cannot reasonably be implemented, even if it were desirable. However, it does give us an opportunity to discuss a new and growing risk that I have worried quietly about for a long time. The CPPIB was depoliticized back in the 1990s. It is a credit to the then Liberal government that it took what was a nearly bankrupt shell, which was highly politicized and whose funds were directed by politicians, and said that it was going to get the sticky fingers and incompetent hands of politicians out of the pensions of Canadians, and it was going to put it in the hands, effectively, of a group of private sector professionals to invest it and obtain a return.
Since that time, the fund has grown from insolvency to $456 billion: almost a half a trillion dollars. Now, I hesitated to say that in this place, because a lot of politicians just got really big eyes, thinking, “Oh my goodness, what could we do with that.” Oh, the schemes they could come up with to deploy a half a trillion dollars. My goodness, they are rubbing their hands together. If only viewers back home could see it. There are politicians rubbing their hands together, thinking about that very thought right now.
Let me give an example of how our government is already leveraging that well. This Prime Minister constantly says that we have the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the G7. True, it was an inheritance and had nothing to do with him, but the only reason it is true is because that $456 billion is deducted from our gross debt to get a much lower net debt and give the appearance that we have a low national debt.
Already, that money, which represents 20% of our GDP, is being leveraged in the minds of the government to justify its irresponsible spending. How long will it be, if the government keeps spending at this pace, before it starts to say, “Oh my goodness, we are out of money. We are broke, and now we need to start looking at that big pot of gold that Canadians had set aside.”
We on the Conservative side will fight tooth and nail to keep the hands of politicians off the pensions of Canadians. We see it already, with the former minister of the environment urging the CPPIB to invest in her pet environmental projects, similar to what happened provincially in Ontario when it almost bankrupted its electrical system doing the exact same thing.
We know many would like to defund our energy sector. We, on the Conservative side, will fight to keep the CPP depoliticized with the single purpose of giving an honest return to our hard-working Canadian employees and the retirees who depend on that fund.