In our third episode of the Courage My Friends series season 10, Tom Fraser, a union researcher and author of Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future, and Becca Steckle, a research and policy analyst with Just Peace Advocates, join us to discuss how Canada’s public sector pensions are funding crises from housing to genocide, the restructuring of Canadian retirement security into capital funding for militarism and welfare erosion around the world and the urgent need for divestment toward a radical pension politics.
According to Fraser:
“What I see as specifically contradictory about the structure of the pension fund is that in an age of de-industrial capitalism returns on investment and ..profits ..are directly contradictory with the point of the pension itself … [which] is to enable the continued life of the worker after retirement. But the structure of that sort of capital accumulation necessitates taking value from those same sorts of necessities. There is a basic level contradiction in terms between the pension as finance and the pension as welfare. And they ultimately hit their collision point in the moment we call retirement.”
Reflecting on what pensions are funding, Steckle says:
“If you look at most of all eight of those pensions … there is a significant percentage of those investments in companies that are actively funneling money, whether the companies themselves are participating in war crimes, genocide, armed conflict … For example, if you look at CPP, the Canadian Pension Plan. They had in 2025 an estimated $27 billion just invested in companies complicit in the occupation, apartheid genocide in Palestine by Israel … That doesn’t include how the companies are violating Indigenous rights here in so-called Canada. That doesn’t include Sudan. That doesn’t include Haiti … That is just looking at Palestine.”
About today’s guests:
Tom Fraser is a researcher based in Toronto. His book on the political economy of Ontario’s pension funds, Invested in Crisis: Public Sector Pensions Against the Future, was released by Between the Lines in February 2025.
Becca Steckle (she/they) holds a law degree from Osgoode Hall Law School and is a registered nurse (RN, non-practicing). As a research and policy analyst at Just Peace Advocates (JPA), Steckle helps to analyze and expose institutional complicity, particularly Canadian institutional complicity in occupied Palestine and Kashmir. As part of JPA’s work, they have analyzed the investment portfolios of more than 15 entities to identify companies complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid, and genocide in the report Our Pensions Are Funding Genocide. She is deeply committed to local organizing efforts and believes in Disability Justice as a daily praxis.
Transcript of this episode can be accessed at georgebrown.ca/TommyDouglasInstitute or here.
Image: Becca Steckle, Tom Fraser / Used with permission.
Music: Ang Kahora. Lynne, Bjorn. Rights Purchased.
Intro Voices: Ashley Booth (Podcast Announcer); Bob Luker (Tommy)
Courage My Friends podcast organizing committee: Chandra Budhu, Ashley Booth, Resh Budhu.
Produced by: Resh Budhu, Tommy Douglas Institute of Labour and Social Justice and Breanne Doyle, rabble.ca.
Host: Resh Budhu.
