Dear fellow SFUFA members,
Since we have officially become a union, it seems timely to remind ourselves what we agreed as a collective to participate in. These decisions are, of course, multifaceted and difficult.
One major change with this shift is that we will be soon asked to ratify a move to join a defined benefit pension plan, the BC Colleges Pension Plan. We've already discussed this at length a year ago, and voted on it. 575/1174 of the SFUFA members voted to
proceed with negotiations for this move, representing a plurality of the votes cast. The intervening negotiations by SFUFA executives have required their selfless work in very difficult times, and they are owed our thanks.
It is not my intent to spark another conversation. Rather, it is my hope that we'll each once again remind ourselves, as individuals, why we're going to vote how we will. We should also not shirk from staring at precisely what we'll be doing. Our choices
will be our own, and made for the multiplicity of reasons we make them. These are hard choices.
We are currently part of a Defined Contribution Plan at SFU, whose stewardship is lead by SFU-based trustees. These are colleagues we can talk to, and they've worked hard to provide us with a diversity of investment options. We can select amongst these
based on our particular individual needs, values and risk tolerance.
One of the signal achievements of the SFU Faculty Pension Plan was the introduction of a fossil fuel free investment option. This has been used as a model by other universities in Canada.
I personally am very proud to be part of this pension plan, because it allows for individuals to acknowledge a reality: climate change is real, significant, and accelerating at a rate which is changing our habitable world in front of our eyes. It acknowledges
the hard work and personal sacrifices of colleagues such as Lynne Quarmby and Tim Takaro and Kirsten Zickfeld and Mark Jaccard (amongst many others). They, and others at SFU, have dedicated their careers to understanding the impacts of climate change and
sounding the alarm.
As the UN Secretary General stated in his address at Columbia on Wednesday: Humanity is waging war on nature. He also goes on to point out pension funds have the unique ability to shift the needle.
We all know this stuff.
We are about to ratify a move to a much larger, multi-institution pension plan, and will consequently have a much lower say in its governance. The advantage is that this is a Defined Benefit plan. We will be contributing more towards it now, but will be
assured a particular amount when we retire. We'll also be undoing a past silliness around post-retirement benefits.
One of the disadvantages of the College plan we will join is that we'll _all_ be obligated to be investing in exactly the same portfolio, which includes significant holdings in the tar sands, oil extraction and other fossil-fuel extraction firms. We should,
as individuals, acknowledge that we'll be banking on the high returns offered in the short term by these industries. We will all be significantly profiting as individuals from some of the most significant drivers of climate change.
There is another issue, and again, I speak for myself. Our email signatures may say we're acknowledging that we're on unceded lands of First Nations. Maybe we actually, as individuals, want to do better. But we will have collectively decided that we'll
be investing in companies such as TransCanada, Enbridge and Suncor. These are companies which are committed to fossil fuel extraction, including tar sands/Arctic oil exploitation. Many of the First Nations are trying desperately to stop this; they are fighting
serious legal and political battles at incredible cost.
thanks
--
Nilima Nigam
Professor
Dept. of Mathematics
Simon Fraser University