Deadly Investments
Take action: Ethical Investing and the Canada Pension Plan
Inter Pares invites you to participate in pushing for reforms to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board's investment of our pension contributions. We are asking Canadians to send letters or e-mails to their provincial ministers, copied to the Canadian Finance Minister, to ask that the issue of socially responsible investing is put on the agenda of the triennial federal-provincial review of the Canada Pension Plan. Click here for their contact information.
Despite international efforts to ban cluster munitions, which maim and kill thousands of civilians, Canadian banks and pension funds continue to finance the manufacture of these weapons
Toronto Star
Apr 05, 2007 04:30 AM
PETER GILLESPIE
During the final days of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah last summer, the Israeli Defence Force showered southern Lebanon with cluster bombs. Each cluster bomb released up to 200 explosive sub-munitions that scattered over a wide area.
An estimated 40 per cent of these sub-munitions failed to detonate; thus at least 500,000 unexploded bomblets remain hidden in fields, orchards, in hedges, even on people's rooftops.
Functioning much like anti-personnel mines, these unexploded munitions pose mortal danger to civilians and at least 14 people have been killed since the end of the conflict.
The UN official in charge of finding and disposing of these sub-munitions said that it was the worst post-conflict contamination he had ever seen and that it would take several years for some areas to be cleared.
Cluster bombs have been used in conflicts in more than 20 countries since World War II. During the Vietnam War, including the massive carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia, the U.S. dropped vast quantities of these munitions.
Handicap International estimated that 40 million unexploded sub-munitions remained in the Lao Republic alone at the end of the war, causing more than 11,000 casualties over the 30 years since the war ended.
More than half of these casualties were children who inadvertently stepped on bomblets or mistook them for toys. In the case of Vietnam, Handicap International estimated post-conflict sub-munitions casualties at between 34,000 and 52,000.
In the early months of the war in Afghanistan, human rights groups criticized the U.S. for dropping cluster bombs on Afghan towns and villages.
Even more insidious was that sub-munitions were bright yellow, almost identical in colour to the food-aid packages being air-dropped to starving villagers.
The results were predictable, although the death toll among civilians will never be known.
In its November 2006 report, Fatal Footprint: The Global Impact of Cluster Munitions, Handicap International found that 98 per cent of the victims of cluster bombs were civilians carrying out their daily activities.
In the Lao Republic, three-quarters of all civilian casualties occurred while farming or tending animals in fields and rice paddies.
A very large proportion of all reported casualties are children.
In response to worldwide revulsion with these weapons, in February the Norwegian government invited the United Nations, along with a group of states and international humanitarian organizations, to meet in Oslo to discuss how to address the use of cluster munitions.
The conference agreed to create a legally binding instrument by 2008 that will prohibit the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions.
Canada was a signatory to the agreement; significantly, Israel, Russia and the United States were not. While the Oslo process is a major step forward, it is unlikely that an international consensus on a total ban of cluster munitions will be achieved.
Canadians might feel virtuous that we are signatories to the Oslo agreement and that we have not used cluster munitions, although we do maintain a stockpile. Few Canadians realize, however, that we are major investors through our banks and pension funds in companies that manufacture cluster munitions.
Research by the Brussels-based Netwerk Vlaanderen identified such Canadian banking stalwarts as Scotiabank, TD Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada as participants in international syndicates providing revolving credit to cluster bomb producers.
Similarly, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which invests the pension contributions of Canadian workers, has more than $50 million invested in the U.S.-based cluster munitions manufacturers Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Textron.
The standard response from banks and pension fund trustees is that until cluster munitions are declared illegal, they see no impediment to making such investments.
This is a facile argument based on the notion that investors bear no responsibility for the human consequences of their activities. That our banking and pension leaders have no ethical framework guiding their lives and work is deeply disturbing.
It need not be this way. Under public pressure, many banks and pension funds have explicitly excluded cluster munitions producers from financing.
The Dutch ASN Bank, the British Cooperative Bank, and the Triodos Bank of the European Union all prohibit weapons investments.
The Citizens' Bank of Canada excludes weapon manufacturers from its portfolio as do the pension funds of Canadian churches.
The Norwegian Government Pension Fund excludes companies involved in the manufacture of cluster munitions as well as those producing nuclear, chemical, biological and incendiary weapon systems. Financial institutions such as these are willing to place their ethical and moral obligations at the centre of their investment decision-making.
Hannah Arendt, that incisive observer of the banality of evil, once said that if we do not dissent, then we consent.
As Canadians we should dissent, loudly and collectively, and insist that our bankers and pension trustees end our complicity in an industry that continues to take a grisly toll on human lives.
Peter Gillespie works with the international social justice organization Inter Pares in Ottawa.
| Reviewed July 10, 2007 |  |
Publishing Policies |
