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One of the great benefits of being a public sector worker is knowing that your work is contributing to the well being of your community.
Educator, health care worker, service provider, or support worker — all of these jobs foster a community in which we provide mutual aid.
These services help us care for and nurture each other. Yet one aspect of our employment, the investment of our pension, has no guardrails to prevent doing harm.
British Columbia’s public sector pension funds, worth over $250 billion, are invested through a government-mandated investment corporation, the BC Investment Management Corporation (BCI). The sole legislated duty of BCI is to ensure the best possible financial return for the pension holders.
This may seem reasonable on the surface, but in practice, it means our pension funds are invested in companies whose activities directly contradict the values we uphold in our daily work. Our pension dollars are invested in fossil fuel companies polluting our atmosphere, pipeline projects infringing on Indigenous rights, and weapons manufacturers supplying countries that violate international law.
A recent report by Corporate Knights stated that BCI has the largest percentage of investments of any Canadian pension in companies that are “counter productive to sustainable development.”
No wonder, when, as Shift Action reports, BCI invests in coal plants in the United States, oil and gas in Alberta, and pipelines in Europe and Brazil.
Just Peace Advocates indicate that public government filings show that BCI is invested in five companies which are listed on the United Nations database of companies complicit with human rights violations.
As public servants dedicated to reconciliation with Indigenous communities, we find ourselves in an alarming ethical dilemma. The very funds that are meant to secure our futures are simultaneously undermining the social and environmental fabric that we’ve worked so hard to strengthen.
As unionized workers, many of us have attempted to influence our pension investments through existing structures. Unions, after all, elect Pension Trustees to our respective pension boards, who in turn set investment principles.
However, B.C.’s current legislative framework for public pensions stands in the way of our values and making meaningful change.
Despite decades of organizing within our unions to pass motions calling on our trustees to invest ethically and to divest from companies that do harm, the net result is only a tiny fraction of investments in pooled ethical funds and a commitment to “engage” with harmful companies that have failed to bring change to corporate behaviour.
What is needed from BCI and our pension funds is concrete action: divestment from unethical firms based on clear, stringent guidelines.
We only need to look to Norway to see successes in pension divestment. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds, has divested from numerous companies based on ethical considerations, including those involved in severe environmental damage, human rights violations, and the production of nuclear weapons.
As public pension holders, we will continue to advocate for divestment within our unions, but we also want to see our government remove the roadblocks to change and enshrine ethical principles for our public investments. We need legislative change to ensure that public pension investments meet ethical standards for human rights, international law, and climate action.
In the upcoming election and beyond, we hope others will join us in reaching out to the candidates in our ridings to find out what their position is on divestment. If they are in favour, what concrete steps are they willing to take once in office?
By aligning our pension investments with our values we can ensure that our retirement savings are not undermining the very communities and environment we’ve spent our careers trying to support.
This upcoming election, let’s make our voices heard and push for a pension system that reflects the values of the people of B.C. — one that secures not just our individual financial futures, but the collective future of our province and the planet.
Reagan Belan is an occupational health and safety worker in Vancouver and Tara Ehrcke is a public school teacher in Victoria. We are both members of the newly formed Divest BC Public Pensions.
