“It’s always so attractive,” Milton Friedman said, “to be able to do good at somebody else’s expense.”
It must be very attractive to be in the position of the do-gooders controlling the investments of the Canada Pension Plan, who have at their mercy some 20 million people in the category of “somebody else” and some $550 billion in cumulative forced contributions at their disposal to accomplish their arbitrary notions of good.
As a recent missive from CPP Investments states, “We commit our portfolio and operations to [be net-zero] of GHG emissions across all scopes by 2050.”
Good grief! The job of a fund manager entrusted with managing other people’s money, absent contrary instructions from the people to whom the money belongs, is to invest it to maximize financial returns without taking inappropriate risks.
Catherine McKenna, the former Liberal environment minister who foreshadowed the pernicious politicization of the CPP by declaring in 2018 that “Canadians can be proud” of the pension fund investing billions in renewable energy, might be fine with her retirement savings being invested to stop global warming.
The same cannot be said for millions of other Canadians who are forced, by virtue of working, to pay into the program.
Of course, CPP Investments claims that its net-zero strategy is consistent with its mandate “to invest the assets of the CPP Fund with a view to achieving a maximum rate of return without undue risk of loss.”
Supposedly the companies that are decarbonizing are also the ones that will provide the highest returns on investment.
Yet as the CPP do-gooders make clear in their 10-page backgrounder, “Investing in the path to net-zero,” their objective is not simply to maximize returns based on where the economy is headed.
Instead, it is to use other people’s money to push the economy in their preferred direction, which is informed by disproportionate climate concerns.
“We contribute to global standard-setting that fosters economy-wide GHG emissions reductions and company-specific disclosure on the path to net-zero,” the document reads.
Elsewhere: “CPP Investments proposes market adoption of a reporting framework that will direct companies to project their capacity to abate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”
And there is the expectation for “companies to report on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors relevant to their industries and investment decision-making. We support and publicly advocate for organizations to align their reporting with the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).”
A perusal of the entire document makes clear that the CPP do-gooders are squarely focused on climate change activism, pushing the world’s economies to net-zero emissions, and imposing “stakeholder” obligations and environmental regulatory burdens on corporations.
And just as CPP Investments is abandoning its responsibility to achieve maximum returns, it is pushing for an economic framework that browbeats corporate boards into similarly abrogating their responsibilities to shareholders — that is, to increase risk-adjusted profits — and instead devote company resources to climate reporting, decarbonization, and participating in raising climate alarm.
CPP Investments does not plan to divest from oil and gas companies, but instead will leverage its position in those and other companies to achieve its goal of “focusing boards on climate change.”
CPP Investments plans to vote against reappointing directors who are insufficiently climate-concerned, and if their “expectations on climate-related oversight are not being met,” it will divest from those companies.
Doing so supposedly will improve investment returns because insufficient corporate climate concern impairs shareholder value — a dubious claim, to say the least.
Meanwhile, CPP Investments’ demands for climate standards and reporting really do destroy shareholder value.
To make matters worse, while CPP Investments looks to impose ever more climate obligations on the companies it invests in, it declares that it is already imposing significant climate costs on the Canadians whose money it is managing by making its internal operations carbon-neutral by the end of next fiscal year.
How much of other people’s money is CPP Investments spending to make itself carbon-neutral? It surely cannot be cheap.
When it was founded in 2000 the organization had five employees, but according to its 2021 annual report, it now has 1,936 full-time employees, nine global offices, and $1.4 billion in annual operating expenses.
The CPP Investments annual report, like its net-zero document, expresses support for “the decarbonizing of our economic system,” which “requires fundamental change in the real economy.”
Both reports make for depressing reading and should engender from all Canadians tired of seeing their money wasted the response: “Spare me the do-gooding and give me my money back.”
Read more at Financial Post
Canadians need to dump this Imbecile Trudeau on the top of his head so he can go bounding around on the top of his head like a Super Ball