The issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance concerns are a factor in making investment decisions.
So far, in examining what the World Health Organization calls the commercial determinants of health, I have been looking at private sector firms that produce products that harm health, such as tobacco, fossil fuels or unhealthy foods.
This issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance concerns are a factor in making investment decisions. Ethical investors, for example, may choose not to invest in tobacco, fossil fuels or armaments for moral reasons. But while ethical investment can be a personal decision about where to invest, most of us have large parts of our investments through our pensions over which we have little or no direct control. So it is important that banks and pension funds invest ethically on our behalf, and that we urge them to do so.
Indeed, in responding to one of my columns, Pender Island resident Paul Hutcheson noted in a Jan. 22 comment in this newspaper that the British Columbia Investment Management Corp., which is an arm of the B.C. government, “has $124.25 million invested in the tobacco industry.” Specifically, the report found, “the Big Five steadily increased their fossil fuel financing exposure from an average of 15.5 per cent in 2020 to 18.4 per cent in 2022” compared to “6.1 per cent for leading U.S. banks and 8.7 per cent for European banks.”
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