A UBC staff-powered campaign to invest in a liveable world for all.
The University of British Columbia Staff Pension Plan (SPP) fund surpassed $3 billion in total assets in March 2025.
All UBC Staff contribute 6.5% of their paychecks to this fund which is managed by UBC Investment Management (UBCIM).
Our deferred wages are building the world we will live in when we retire. We are UBC staff who want to use our pension fund to build a future that is worth fighting for.
UBC staff want and deserve a future that is free from:
We can start to build a better world to retire into by removing 5 companies from UBC’s Staff Pension Plan fund portfolio.
Read the open letter below to learn more.
Open letter:
Why does UBC invest our deferred wages in genocide, apartheid, anti-human technology, weapons, and climate destruction?
We’re asking all UBC staff and pension contributors (past or present) to join our campaign. The first step: ask the question.
Part 1: Dear UBC,
We are UBC staff concerned about our futures. Our pension plan is currently invested in companies that mass produce weapons of war, sell instruments of apartheid, and push the development of pipelines that are illegally occupying Indigenous land and destroying the natural world. We witness wars, military occupation, apartheid, and genocide abroad. The waterways at home are poisoned and the skies filled with smoke as a result of environmental degradation and fossil fuel expansion. All of this is directly funded using our deferred wages; none of this is done with our consent.
If our deferred wages are invested in war and climate destruction, then that is the future we can expect when we retire. Why do you invest our pension funds in a future that requires and promotes the ever increasing profitability of genocide, apartheid, anti-human tech, weapons, and climate destruction?
Life is so painful for so much of humanity already, and the way you are managing our deferred wages makes us even more scared for our future.
We want our pension fund free from investments in the following five target companies: Elbit Systems, Israel Discount Bank, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin, and TC Energy.
What future do you envision for us when we retire, and how do you justify the inevitable harm your current portfolio of investments will cause us, our peers, our children, the environment, and the world?
Part 2: So why does UBC invest our pension fund in…
Genocide
Elbit Systems is an Israeli military technology company that receives investment from the UBC Staff Pension Plan. Through investing in this company, UBC staff are directly funding the genocide in Gaza.
On April 1st, 2024, the Israeli military struck three World Central Kitchen (WCK) vehicles carrying aid workers who had just unloaded more than 100 tons of food aid at a warehouse in Gaza. The attack, carried out by an Elbit Systems-manufactured Hermes 450 drone, killed seven WCK workers, including Canadian citizen Jacob Flickinger. Flickinger’s parents rejected apologies from Israeli authorities, contending that the country has used “food as a weapon” in Gaza, and “continued firing until all the [aid] workers were dead”. The founder of WCK similarly believes that the attack was a systematic and intentional attack on aid workers. After the WCK team’s first car was attacked, they escaped to a second car which was also attacked. The team again escaped to a third car, which was subsequently struck, killing all seven. All of this occurred despite clearance from Israeli military officials to use the pre-planned route designated as a safe humanitarian route. Months before this attack, the Israeli commander who ordered the strike signed an open letter calling for the Israeli military to forbid “humanitarian supplies and the operation of hospitals inside Gaza City”. This deliberate attack on aid workers shows genocidal intent. Through its investment in Elbit Systems, UBC staff are directly funding the severance of food aid to Gaza and the killing and intimidation of humanitarian workers who are delivering aid.
Apartheid
The UBC Staff Pension Plan has hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in Israel Discount Bank, an Israeli financial institution that provides construction financing, mortgage lending, and banking services to illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. These services provide the financial backing required to build housing, develop land, and normalize permanent civilian communities in occupied territory. Through contractual agreements, Israel Discount Bank has financial rights to these stolen lands with illegal projects as collateral for their financing.
The United Nations Security Council, the International Court of Justice, and the majority of nation states, including Canada, consider these settlements illegal under international law. Israel’s policy of settling its civilians in occupied Palestinian territory contravenes fundamental humanitarian law set out in the Fourth Geneva Convention. Illegal settlement expansion purposefully leads to fragmenting Palestinian territory, displacing families and communities, and undermining the ability of Palestinians to self-determination. Israeli settlers have carried out widespread and violent attacks on Palestinian communities during, and after, the development of these settlements. These illegal activities have been condemned by Canada and resulted in sanctions against Israeli settlers.
As just one example, Israel Discount Bank financed the third stage of the Amirei Nof housing project, which was built on 5,077 square metres of land belonging to the Palestinian village of Azzun. The project consisted of 70 housing units and was completed in 2016.
The UBC Staff Pension Plan’s 2024 holdings report indicates that the Plan has invested in the banks backing and benefiting from illegal occupation, including Israel Discount Bank. These investments connect members’ retirement savings to financial institutions that profit off of the development of illegal Israeli settlements within occupied Palestinian territory. Not only are there clear ethical concerns with investments benefiting from occupation, but there is long-term risk to the stability of the Staff Pension Plan aswhen further international sanctions and/or legal actions are taken against illegal Israeli settlements.
Anti-human technology
The UBC Staff Pension Plan’s investment in Microsoft goes far beyond workplace emails and video calls. The company profits from using technology as a weapon against people. Microsoft provides cloud storage infrastructure and artificial intelligence tools that facilitate unlawful ICE deportation and arrest operations, surveills student activists, and drive the world’s first AI-powered genocide through its partnership with the Israeli government.
In December 2025, a coalition of international legal and advocacy rights groups sent a letter warning that the company is at risk of criminal and civil legal liability for its complicity in human rights violations, saying that this technology has allowed Israel to store surveillance and other data on nearly all Palestinians and use that stored data to develop “kill targets.” In part, this is done by translating and transcribing phone calls or text messages between civilians, including “people giving directions to one another in text, which can then be cross-referenced with the military’s own AI system to pinpoint locations.” A significant amount of violence perpetrated via Microsoft’s technology comes through its partnership with Palantir, which has been called "the AI arms dealer of the 21st Century.” Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp openly admits that the product is used “on occasion to kill people."
Another agency that relies heavily on Microsoft’s cloud storage is US immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In 2024, campus protests erupted throughout North America calling on universities to divest from genocide, including an encampment on MacInnes Field at UBC that lasted 71 days. The movement began at Columbia University, where graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was a prominent spokesperson on behalf of protesters. In March 2025, Khalil was unlawfully detained by the US government, and President Trump declared the arrest was “the first of many to come.” Soon after, nine foreign students who participated in protests or spoke out had their visas or residency status revoked. Khalil, a permanent US resident, was released from ICE custody over three months later. Amnesty International cites AI-powered surveillance as a threat to human rights in these instances, saying it creates “a climate of fear… exacerbating the ‘chilling effect’ for migrant communities and international students.”
As for the Microsoft workers who don’t support its technology being used to monitor, target, and kill human beings - many have been penalized for speaking out. In February 2025, five employees were ejected from a meeting after openly protesting AI contracts and asking the question “Does Our Code Kill Kids?” Six months later, another four employees were fired for protesting Microsoft’s connection to the IOF.
Weapons
Lockheed Martin is an American weapons manufacturer that the UBC Staff Pension Plan invests in. Through its investment in Lockheed Martin, UBC staff’s deferred wages are directly funding the killing of children and civilians as described below.
In the morning of August 9th, 2018 a bomb manufactured by Lockheed Martin was dropped on a school bus parked at the main market in the town of Dahyan, Yemen. The bomb, dropped by a Saudi Arabian-led coalition, killed 51 civilians, including 40 children, and wounded 79, including 56 children. At the time of the attack, the school bus was carrying dozens of boys, some as young as six, on a field trip to visit the graves of soldiers. The bus stopped at the market so that the driver could buy water for the children. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), all of those killed and wounded were civilians. HRW spoke to several survivors of the attack about their experiences. Three brothers, Ahmad, 14, Hassan, 13, and Yahia, 11, told HRW that their friend Zakaria, 11, was chatting with boys on the bus when the bomb hit. One brother told HRW, “Zakaria rode up to the bus on his little bicycle and was chatting with friends.” “He was torn to pieces.”
Climate destruction
TC Energy Corporation is a Canadian energy company that receives investment dollars from the UBC Staff Pension Plan. TC Energy constructed and owns Coastal GasLink, a pipeline connecting natural gas resources in northeastern BC to an export facility at Kitimat on the coast. Throughout the pipeline’s construction and operation, TC Energy has caused widespread environmental destruction, poisoning local communities’ sources of drinking water, destroying important cultural sites of the Wet'suwet'en Nation, while enabling and encouraging the police to harass and arrest Indigenous land defenders.
Although the Coastal GasLink pipeline was approved by five of six elected Wet’suwet’en Indian Act Bands, the project was universally opposed by the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs, the traditional governing body of the nation according to both Wet’suwet’en law and the Supreme Court of Canada. Amnesty International Canada called the construction of the pipeline “a brazen violation of the community’s right to self-determination and a lamentable step backwards in Canada’s journey toward reconciliation with Indigenous peoples” while also criticizing the human rights impacts of the climate crisis, which will be worsened by the project.
In response to opposition from the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and Indigenous land defenders, TC Energy obtained an injunction against anyone impeding construction of the pipeline from the BC Supreme Court. This injunction enabled the RCMP to violently crack down on Indigenous land defenders. Private security hired by TC Energy and police, clad in military gear, armed with assault rifles, and accompanied by canine units, arrested and forcibly removed unarmed land defenders and journalists alike from the construction site.
TC Energy has failed to contain the environmental destruction that has resulted from the pipeline. Sediment from construction has spread into the local Morice River, “one of the last remaining sources of drinking water and salmon spawning grounds in Wet’suwet’en territory”, causing it to turn murky brown. “It’s infuriating, because we are being policed and criminalized for protecting our right to clean water and our responsibility to take care of all of the other living beings that rely on it, especially the salmon,” said Sleydo’ Molly Wickham, a wing chief of the Gidimt’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation. The provincial government fined TC Energy almost $1.4 million due to environmental failures, issuing over 51 warnings for repeated failures to protect the local environment. TC Energy has treated these fines as a cost of business, rather than a standard they must adhere to.
Through the UBC Staff Pension Plan’s investment in TC Energy, UBC staff are directly funding and encouraging the poisoning of BC’s environment, the proliferation of fossil fuels, and state and police repression of Indigenous groups and their land rights.
For now, we’re asking all UBC staff and pension contributors (past or present) to join our campaign. The first step: ask the question.