Money not where mouth is

The BC government has invested pensions into companies BC workers do not support

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Money talks, bullshit walks. When the NDP ran this province through the 1990s, they oversaw investments made by the huge government workers’ pension plan, the BC Investment Management Corporation (assets in 2004: $64 billion). Despite talk about big bad tobacco companies, genetically modified food, the value of small business and the evil of war industries, the NDP had us deep into Monsanto for $25 million, Enron for about the same, Walmart to the tune of $55 million, Dow Chemical—makers of Naplam, heavily used in the first Gulf War in 2001—for about $26 million, and about $66 million invested in three major tobacco companies.

The Liberals have not altered the general thrust of this pension investing scheme. We are today deep into Rothmans, British American Tobacco, Halliburton, Coca Cola, Raytheon, Imperial Oil, McDonald’s and Murdoch’s News Corp.

So long as the BC government under any party feels no compulsion to look at what it backs with our pension fund investments, anyone who works in the public sector enjoys more teens smoking cigarettes, more bombs dropped on innocents, more Coca Cola for babies, more oil drilling rigs off the coast and in parks, more Big Macs dribbling their secret sauce down the chins of more obese kids, more union-busting at Walmart, and more lying Fox News.

It’s not as though the idea of screening investments for ethical practices is a new idea. The Quakers have been doing it since the 1600s. The Domini 400 Social Index, a reliable guide to ethical companies, has been operating for 15 years. There are over 200 successful mutual fund companies in North America that use some form of ethical screening, directing nearly $3 trillion in pension and mutual fund assets away from war profiteers, tobacco producers, and Fox News, and toward companies that try to do right. It was the embryonic ethical investment movement in the 1970s that formed the most effective front against the Apartheid regime of South Africa that finally cut and ran because of it.

Not only does ethical investing work, it doesn’t cost anyone lost money. Studies show that ethical screening of investments has not produced any discernible decline in performance of funds. There is a good argument in favour of the opposite. Non-discerning investors paid the price for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown and the Union Carbide deathtrap at Bhopal.

Because of our government investment policies, BC public sector workers do well when small tactical nuclear bombs are deployed, when the space-based missile shield is installed, and whenever war breaks out. Because of BC government policies of both leading parties, we all profit when your kid sneaks around behind the school and lights up a cig.

Despite arguments to the contrary, it is not the case that investment directors of public sector pension funds are disallowed from directing investments according to ethical choices. The government of the day can simply instruct the investment managers at BC Investment Management Corporation to screen for ethical investments, and it’s done. But no government of the left or the right has thought to do so.

Until they do, all teachers, college instructors and university professors, all elected city hall representatives, as well as school board and park board representatives, and all elected MLAs—both sides of the floor—are making money backing war, cancer, bad eating, and media lies.

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