Mr. Speaker, I wish to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Verchères—Les-Patriotes.
We have before us a motion that is worth reading again. The motion, which has been put forward by the NDP, reads as follows:
That, in the opinion of this House, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Review Board should be guided by ethical investment policies which would ensure that our pension investments are socially responsible and do not support companies or enterprises that manufacture or trade in military arms and weapons, have records of poor labour practices, contribute to environmental degradation, or whose conduct, practices or activities are similarly contrary to Canadian values.
Generally speaking, we are in agreement with the spirit of this motion. We know it is not votable. Still, it opens up a subject of debate we think is very important, especially when are discussing the savings of thousands of Canadians. We know that Quebec has a different system, the Caisse de dépôt et placement, which manages the collective savings of Quebeckers.
I find it interesting that the NDP has introduced this motion, since it asks a fundamental question: should a public system or money managed in a pension fund have financial profitability as a goal, or should it not also aim for social, environmental and ethical benefits?
In my opinion, the question ought to be debated and the answer is that it is of no benefit to the people of Canada—nor of Quebec—to have a vision for their invested savings that focuses strictly on short-term profit.
What use would it be to have a satisfactory pension fund but live in a completely polluted environment where the rights of workers are ignored, and where we are indirectly supporting child labour in many Southeast Asian countries? The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, like the Caisse de dépôt et placement and all pension funds, has a very important example to set in this respect.
We know that half of the money going through the Canadian system comes from the workers' pension funds. In Canada alone, this means $600 billion: that is not insignificant.
As a result, as soon as the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board adopted an ethical position on its investments, with a certain number of guidelines to be discussed by its members and then made public, it seems to me that this would generate the necessary pressure to ensure that the investment strategies of our public funds and our pension funds strike that balance between short term profitability—for we must not delude ourselves, it is short term—and social conscience.
I emphasize the words short term because, when there is pollution, it costs money sooner or later, to clean up that pollution. Overall, the net return for society can quickly become negative. Even in the throne speech, the new Prime Minister mentioned that it was important for the federal government to assume its responsibilities and decontaminate the lands it had itself contaminated over the years.
Had that been our view at the time—granted, environmental awareness was less developed than it is now—we would not be having to spend that money now and it could have been used to meet social objectives to meet immediate needs: health, post-secondary education, social housing, and the like.
Another thing—and the reason why I have already said that all guidelines for this investment and this ethical investment policy must be made public—is that the investment policy or strategy of many pension funds these days is not known to the contributors.
Workers are not informed of these strategies. They are not involved in making the decisions. So the board has a responsibility to show the way on this. It is absolutely essential that all of our pension funds have transparent investment policies and that the contributors be aware of those policies.
This is even more the case for Quebeckers, because often, very often, too often, pension funds are administered out of Toronto and reflect Canadian values, which are not necessarily always values Quebec society shares.
I believe it is also important to point out that, with the NDP motion, we would be showing how important it is to pay attention to the positive achievements of companies, to show that economic performance and social performance are not mutually exclusive. Far from it; they often go hand in hand.
We know that, in the past, investment strategy decisions based on ethical values have had an impact. For example, an international campaign was conducted in South Africa to disinvest the money from the pension plans of workers in Canada, Quebec and many other western countries. The international community agreed that the apartheid regime should not be supported through foreign investments. The campaign produced excellent results. As we know, the apartheid regime is now history, largely because of that campaign, which promoted an ethical form of investment by boycotting investments in South Africa. I remember that a large number of Quebeckers participated in that boycott.
Still, I want to take this opportunity to point out a danger. With investment protection clauses such as those found in the North American Free Trade Agreement, particularly in chapter 11, a campaign such as the one that was conducted by the international community against investments in South Africa would not be possible.
It is important that, at the international level, pension plans, savers and investors must clearly be allowed to choose where they want to invest, not only on the basis of revenue generation, but also on the basis of socially or ethically acceptable values. We must keep this in mind. We should make sure that investment protection clauses do not include criteria that prevent the introduction of an ethical investment policy.
I gave the example of South Africa. I could also mention Nike, a shoe manufacturer. In fact, Nike does not manufacture shoes; it sells sport shoes and all sorts of other products. That company does not manufacture anything at all: it uses 736 subcontractors in 51 countries. It indirectly employs over half a million people, mostly in Asia.
In 1998, there was a campaign to protest the fact that several of these subcontractors were using solvents extremely harmful to the health of their workers, particularly women. There were also children working for these subcontractors, several of whom were resorting to anti-union practices, with the company's blessing. This situation resulted in a boycott of Nike's products.
In one year, the company's profits went down by half, which meant that it had no choice but to agree to a certain number of things, particularly involving child labour, health and safety and the freedom to unionize. At the same time, the company engaged external auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers, to verify the changes. Obviously, it is not yet perfect, far from it in fact, but we can say that in comparison to its competitors, such as Adidas, the company has made a great deal of progress.
So we see that ethical investment and making savers and consumers more responsible can yield results in terms of changes in corporate behaviour, encouraging them to adopt responsible behaviour.
It is not only true in southern nations. In the United States there have been many violations of workers' rights, especially in the agricultural sector in California. Here in Canada, we know that there are still companies that resort to hiring scabs during legal strikes, and that they do so with the Liberal government's blessing.
I think this motion not only has the merit of provoking debate, but ought to be supported by every member of this House.
I will close by saying that the Bloc Quebecois shares exactly those worries. One of our colleagues, Stéphan Tremblay, introduced a bill to oblige pension fund administrators to be more transparent, so that savers could have some input into investment strategies, to make investment more responsible. We will have no problem supporting this motion.
