Hon. Marilou McPhedran: Honourable senators, I want to thank colleagues in the Canadian Senators Group for this opportunity to ask a question. It’s a rare and generous offer.

The 2022 Hong Kong Watch report recently revealed that Canada has holdings in Chinese companies on the U.S. sanctions list and companies that have provided equipment used in camps where it’s estimated that about a million Uighurs are still detained.

Respected former parliamentarians Irwin Cotler and David Kilgour noted that Canada Pension Plan investments are more than $50 billion in Chinese companies. In addition, other pension plan investments have been reported to have been made in companies connected to the forced labour of Uighurs. We also have reports of several provincial Crown investment management corporations listed as investing in equities and companies accused of human rights violations in China. Perhaps more shocking is the fact that Canadian universities have endowment funds invested with firms that are exposed to these inequities.

Although we condemn the genocide, we continue what Hong Kong Watch has called “passively supporting oppression” by investing in Chinese equities with proven links to industries in contravention of human rights.

My question, Senator Gold: How is Canada identifying violators? What is Canada doing to ensure that public and private investments, such as the Canada Pension Plan, are not contributing to these human rights violations by investing in such companies?

Hon. Marilou McPhedran: Honourable senators, I would like to take a moment of my time to thank my colleagues Senator Yonah Martin and the other members of the Conservative caucus for very generously giving me this time today. As everybody knows, unaffiliated independent senators almost never get this chance, so I’m very grateful.

I’m also delighted to be able to speak today when guests from West Carleton Secondary School are with us, and I want to also salute our colleagues who have already spoken about the importance of youth engagement and youth participation in strengthening our democracy.

I met Hamza, who was the host from West Carleton at a reception that focused on lowering the federal voting age to 16. We got to talking, and I said that, “Yes, indeed, the Senate loves to have guests, and we particularly like to welcome young guests,” so this is the result of that conversation. Thank you, Hamza, for following up, and thank you to your student colleagues who are with us today.

On Monday this week, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reported on the heightened tensions among the world’s nine nuclear-armed states. It is very much exacerbated by the illegal invasion by Russia of Ukraine and, of course, as we are all aware, by Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons if he is not allowed to complete his genocide of the Ukrainian people.

Countries increasing their stockpiles of nuclear warheads included the U.K., which in 2021 announced its decision to increase the ceiling on its total warhead stockpile. This is a reversal of a decades-long trend since World War II. The increases that have been announced by a number of countries that have nuclear weapons come despite the fact that the UN Security Council — all five permanent members, in fact — made a statement just last year saying, “. . . nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Yet, the nine nuclear-armed states spent $82.4 billion on their nuclear weapons in 2021, during a continuing global pandemic and only months before Russia began assembling troops on the border of Ukraine. This is an inflation-adjusted increase of $6.5 billion over the previous year.

This report is entitled Squandered: 2021 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending.

I want to note with great appreciation that more than 40 senators have signed on to the parliamentarian pledge to work to prohibit nuclear weapons, and next week is Nuclear Ban Week in Austria. Thank you very much.