More calls for ethical investing

The Saskatchewan Medical Association (SMA) is calling on the CMA's investment arm, MD Management Ltd., to create an ethical funds portfolio so physicians do not have to invest in companies involved in the arms trade. CMA Holdings, which includes 14 subsidiaries, has $24 billion in assets under its administration, and 110 000 physician and family member clients.

In May 2006, the SMA passed a resolution sponsored by Physicians for Global Survival that called upon MD Management to create a portfolio “to allow investment in a manner consistent with respect to militarism and environmental sustainability.”

In a follow-up letter to Dr. Louise Cloutier, chair of CMA's board of directors, the president of Physicians for Global Survival (Canada) asked the board for its response.

“Our understanding was that the CMA was responsible to act upon motions put forward by individual provincial medical associations,” says Dr. Dale Dewar, Physicians for Global Survival's president.

In her written response to Dewar on Feb. 28, 2007, Cloutier described the issue as “challenging” for MD Management. Although the company has conducted “extensive client market research, MD has not seen any material level of demand for restrictions on investments beyond tobacco, nor has there been sufficient demand for MD to produce and bring to market an ethical fund,” she states.

The SMA received a similar letter from the CMA, says SMA Communications Director Marcus Davies. Last November, the SMA reported back to its members. “What they seemed to find satisfying in the response is that MD does provide access to the ethical funds offered by other fund managers,” Davies says. The issue will likely progress if physicians call their MD representatives and ask them to shift their investments to some of those other products, he suggested. “You can create demand by using them,” Davies adds.

Tim Hague, vice-president of marketing for MD Management, added in an interview that MD has also received letters from clients suggesting that imposing investment prohibitions beyond the long-standing one against tobacco is an imposition of some people's views on others. He repeated MD's position that it has not seen significant demand for the company to offer its own ethical funds.

“We have never seen any material level of demand nationally, and we don't do our research by provincial association,” says Hague.

But Dewar, a family physician in Wynyard, Sask., says the SMA resolution should indicate a substantial level of demand for such funds, as does the 600-plus membership of the Physicians for Global Survival.

She referred to The Lancet and BMJ's recent calls for Reed Elsevier, The Lancet's owner, to stop hosting arms fairs (see page 1265). Her organization and members who passed the Saskatchewan resolution would like MD to divest itself of any investments in military arms or equipment, she says.

“Military equipment has only one purpose, and that's to kill,” says Dewar. “That is hardly consistent with the goals of an organization that's devoted to health.”

That kind of investment prohibition is increasingly difficult because of corporate consolidation, says Hague. “The General Electric Corporation makes jet engines for both commercial and military uses. Does that mean we would not invest in General Electric? Not withstanding that they also manufacture medical and diagnostic imaging equipment? My point is that you get into a realm that becomes impossible to manage.”

Physicians who want to invest in ethical funds can do so through MD's Consolidated Account, using third-party funds, he stresses.

Physicians for Global Survival will now urge individual members of their organization and, more broadly, the CMA, to ensure their investments are in ethical funds, Dewar says.

“Our next step is going to be on the individual level, to make sure MD Management knows of those of us who have actually taken our money elsewhere,” she says.