UPP’s Complicity
Table of Contents
- UPP’s Background
- UPP’s Complicit Investments
- Priority Divestment Targets
- Duty to Divest
- UPP’s Response
UPP’s Background
Established in 2020, the University Pension Plan (UPP) is a Jointly Sponsored Pension Plan wherein “joint decision-making and collaboration between [employers and employees]” is claimed as “a cornerstone of UPP’s governance structure.” UPP’s website states that “joint governance ensures a high degree of accountability and transparency while putting the interests of Plan members at the centre of every decision.” Representatives of both employees and employers from member institutions instruct UPP’s Trustees on how to invest its assets. Trustees sit on different sub-committees, and the Plan reports back to members on decisions made by those committees in accordance with UPP’s legal obligations to preserve its fiduciary duty.
Among UPP’s main commitments is an Investment Exclusion Policy which upholds ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) principles. Social principles are broadly defined within the financial sector as including “labor standards, wages and benefits, workplace and board diversity, racial justice, pay equity, human rights, talent management, community relations, privacy and data protection, health and safety, supply-chain management and other human capital and social justice issues” (emphasis added). The UPP’s Investment Exclusion Policy states that “Investors have a responsibility to not only respond to evolving environmental, social and governance issues, but also to promote a just, sustainable economy and society. We do not, and will not, take that responsibility lightly.” Further, the policy seeks to avoid “UPP’s investments contributing to or being directly linked to severe adverse social or environmental impacts.” UPP claim that “there are no exceptions to this policy.” Yet, we estimate that at least $790 million of UPP’s portfolio suggests otherwise. Read on for an overview of UPP’s complicit investments.
UPP’s Complicit Investments
As part of its commitment to transparency, UPP discloses its holdings valued at $5 million or more, and provides a range for each investment’s estimated value. For example, UPP publicly discloses its investment of $10-$25 million in Safran Corporation, which has sold arms to the Israeli government, and which collaborates with the Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems. This complicity is especially close to home, since Safran has its Canadian headquarters, along with two industrial sites, right here in Ontario. UPP has also disclosed a current investment in the range of $5 to $10 million in Booking.com, a company named by the UN for its operations in illegal settlements within the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). UPP should not invest in companies like Booking.com, AirBnB, and Expedia, which profit by listing hotels and “holiday homes” in areas where the actual homes of Palestinians have been illegally seized, and the families who live in them displaced.
UPP also publishes proxy voting records on a quarterly basis. In brief, as an investor, the Plan can vote on shareholder matters in the same way that an individual shareholder would vote. Looking through proxy voting records therefore provides us with insight into UPP’s “hidden” holdings, so long as UPP participated in a vote concerning that company in that quarter. Proxy voting records from 2025 Q1 show that UPP holds investments in multiple arms manufacturers which are known to have supplied the State of Israel in its current assault on Palestinians. For example, General Dynamics makes the metal bodies for the MK-80 bomb series, the largest of which is the notorious 2,000-lb bomb. In November 2023, those 2,000-lb bombs were dropped on Jabalia refugee camp, killing at least 195 people and wounding hundreds more.
Investments in General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris, Teledyne Technologies, Raytheon, Textron, Northrop Grumman, and Huntington Ingalls are all evidenced by proxy voting records, as well as the Israeli company Axon Vision, which specializes in Artificial Intelligence weaponry. It should be noted that the use of AI in Gaza has exponentially increased the civilian death toll; programs such as Lavender rely on flawed algorithms to assess military threat, while military drones target anyone who might be in an area marked by the army as a “kill zone,” including children. In March 2024, drone footage obtained by Al-Jazeera showed the repeated fatal targeting of four unarmed Palestinian civilians by an AI weapons system. In the face of claims to “precision,” the data concerning the use of these weapons demonstrate the opposite: an increase in civilian death, and an increased risk of war resulting from the brinkmanship that occurs when states compete to buy increasingly violent weapons.
On June 20, 2024, United Nations human rights experts issued a press release which declared that “The transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel may constitute serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws and risk State complicity in international crimes, possibly including genocide.” The UN human rights experts called on arms manufacturers – including UPP-invested companies General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman – to immediately cease all transfers of weapons, parts, components, and ammunition to Israeli forces. Yet, despite this, proxy voting records from 2025 Q1 indicate that, even now, UPP continues to hold investments in all four of these companies, along with many other arms manufacturers.
UPP also holds investments facilitating illegal occupation in companies like Hyundai, whose excavators have been used to destroy Palestinian homes in the OPT; excavators from HD Hyundai Construction Equipment were used to demolish homes in Masafer Yatta in 2022. It is invested in PepsiCo, which owns Sabra (hummus) and SodaStream, both of which operate on and profit from illegal occupation. Moreover, Sabra funds and supports the Israeli military, and SodaStream’s Palestinian workers report violations of their labour rights (such as being fired for requesting sick leave) and human rights (prayer carpets confiscated by supervisors). Another apartheid investment which UPP holds is ABB Ltd, a multinational corporation which manufactures electrification products. ABB equipment is used at Kalia Solar Field, one of the largest commercial fields on Occupied Palestinian and Bedouin lands. Those occupied communities have no access to its electricity; paradoxically, ABB supplies Beirar, the electrical substation which powers illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank.
These investments violate UPP’s commitment to furthering equality, including equality of labour conditions, outlined in UPP’s Inequality Stewardship Plan. “As a systemic risk, inequality is a concern for both social justice and capital markets. It erodes social cohesion, diminishes trust in key institutions, fuels civil and political unrest, increases the damage caused by environmental and health crises, and leaves societies incapable of tackling critical challenges. In turn, these weakened social systems harm macroeconomic systems on which long-term stable investment returns rely,” UPP states.
An initial calculation, based on a sum of UPP’s published holdings at the low end of their value range, estimates those complicit investments to total at least $790 million. However, it does not factor in UPP’s indirect investments (i.e. in pooled funds), nor holdings discovered in proxy voting records.
Priority Divestment Targets
The Workers’ Campaign for UPP Divestment identifies the following UPP holdings as the most pressing targets for immediate divestment.
Among these priority targets, each disclosed complicit investment ranks in the lowest tier of value ($5-$10 million dollars) among UPP’s disclosed holdings. Divesting fully from all of these companies would mean the reallocation of no more than $95 million in investments – a drop in the bucket of UPP’s $12.8 billion portfolio. That’s no more than 0.8% of UPP’s total holdings.
| Complicit holding | Amount invested | Disclosed investment? | Proxy voting? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boeing | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| Caterpillar | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| Chevron | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| General Dynamics | Unknown | No | Yes |
| Honeywell | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| IBM | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| Lockheed Martin | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| Motorola | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| Northrop Grumman | Unknown | No | Yes |
| Palantir | $5-10 million | Yes | Yes |
| Valero | Unknown | No | Yes |
Duty to Divest
On September 20, 2024, a United Nations Special Committee issued a report concluding that the policies and practices of Israel during the reporting period are consistent with the characteristics of genocide. They recommend that all States should urgently hold business entities fully accountable for complicity in violations of international law, whether through their supply of arms, provision of digital products and services and/or engagement in technology transfer and facilitation (including artificial intelligence) or links to value chains (including algorithmic-based decision-making systems) that enable Israel’s ongoing onslaught in Gaza and apartheid system of injustice in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. In June 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur issued a report which highlighted the extent to which “corporate entities have profited from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide” and urged that the private sector be held accountable for its complicity in gross violations of international law.
Within the financial sector, most institutions evaluate the ESG impact of their investing using the framework developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). GRI Standard 411 pertains to the rights of Indigenous peoples and specifies that companies are obligated to enact due diligence to ensure that the individual and collective rights of Indigenous peoples, such as the right to retain their own customs and institutions, and the right to self-determination, are not being violated.[1] Where this does happen, companies should take steps to mitigate and remediate harm.
The GRI standard was itself developed with reference to two important sets of guidelines that are grounded in the importance of upholding human rights when conducting business: 1) The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and 2) The OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct. “Enterprises should recognize, within the framework of internationally recognised human rights, the international human rights obligations of the countries in which they operate,” states the latter. More specifically, the OECD Guidelines state the following on human rights:
§ “Respect for human rights is the global standard of expected conduct for enterprises independently of States’ abilities and/or willingness to fulfil their human rights obligations, and does not diminish those obligations.” (42)
§ “A State’s failure either to enforce relevant domestic laws, or to implement international human rights obligations or the fact that it may act contrary to such laws or international obligations does not diminish the expectation that enterprises respect human rights.” (43)
§ “In the context of armed conflict or heightened risk of gross abuses, enterprises should conduct enhanced due diligence in relation to adverse impacts, including violations of international humanitarian law.” (45)
The OECD’s 38 permanent member countries include Canada, Israel, and the United States. UPP’s Investment Exclusion Policy states that it is informed by both UN guidelines and the OECD guidelines. Indeed, UPP’s Responsible Investing Policy explicitly claims that “UPP respects internationally recognized human rights and seeks to identify and address risks related to adverse human rights impacts contributed to or directly linked to our investments.” Clearly, the above-named companies in which UPP holds investments do not abide by these guidelines.
UPP’s Response
In establishing a joint governance structure, UPP claims to offer its members agency in making investment decisions. If that is true, the Plan must act when its members demand divestment from companies which violate international human rights law as well as UPP’s own investment policies. In spite of this, UPP has taken no action to address demands by members to divest our money from genocide, apartheid, and illegal occupation.
The UPP website continually references its successes in the area of sustainable investing through a program of divestment from fossil fuels, demonstrating that divestment from harmful financial funds is possible. Nevertheless, in response to the demands for divestment presented by our campaign, UPP claims that divestment is too difficult and represents a threat to its fiduciary duty. Given that divestment was possible in the case of fossil fuels, we can only draw the conclusion that the refusal to divest from genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation of Palestinians is a political decision made in violation of members’ rights as jointly governing partners. We reject the “greenwashing” of UPP by way of its claims to environmental responsibility; it must be noted that investments in arms manufacturers contravene UPP’s stated environmental commitments, since weapons discharges bear a highly polluting impact. Land poisoned by weapons is made unlivable, a situation which has occasioned the term “ecocide.”
When we challenged UPP over its decision to exclude all investments domiciled in Russia within two weeks of the invasion of Ukraine, and not to take any actions over the complicit investments highlighted by our campaign, UPP pointed to a legal obligation resulting from Canadian government sanctions. Not only is this argument disingenuous, since it ignores the documented role of UPP leadership in calling for sanctions, but, moreover, it ignores the above-named responsibilities of enterprises to respect international human rights even when States fail to implement human rights obligations or to uphold international law. As World Beyond War and others have shown, the Canadian government continues to export weapons to Israel, often via the loophole of exporting weapons components to arms manufacturers in the United States. Yet, such abject failures at the State level to halt the genocide of the Palestinian people do not absolve UPP of its own responsibilities.
UPP sells itself by claiming to invest responsibly. Yet, when Palestinian life is at stake, it claims that divestment is not possible without violating fiduciary duty. This argument is consistent with many investment organizations which use fiduciary duty as a catch-all phrase with which to shut down divestment demands. To this, we point not only to those same organizations’ ESG commitments, but also to the fact that fiduciary duty incorporates an ethical duty not to invest in human rights violations and a legal duty to abide by international law. Divesting from one fund and investing in another does not mean that fiduciary duty will be compromised. In fact, experts argue that the short-term gains of defence stocks are far negated by the long-term destabilization of war.
We refuse the investment of our pension money in the destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods. As university workers, we also refuse the investment of our pension money in scholasticide. Recalling the historic example of South African apartheid, we demand that the University Pension Plan divest from genocide, apartheid and illegal occupation NOW.
[1] GRI 411 Rights of Indigenous Peoples. “According to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the right to self-determination enables indigenous peoples to ‘freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ and have the right to ‘autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.’ Indigenous peoples also have the right to occupy and use their lands or territories, including those who hold or use land pursuant to informal or customary rights. Indigenous peoples cannot be relocated without free, prior, and informed consent. They also have the right to redress in cases where their lands or resources have been occupied or damaged without their free, prior, and informed consent. Due diligence is expected of an organization in order to avoid infringing on the rights of indigenous peoples through its activities.”