PBI-Canada notes the Canada Pension Plan’s USD $53.7 million investment in weapons company Lockheed Martin

In July 2019, Corporate Knights magazine reported, “Lockheed Martin is the largest weapons company in the U.S., with a history that includes making the bomber that dropped Little Boy, the first nuclear weapon that decimated Hiroshima during the Second World War.”

In January 2020, USA Today additionally reported that Lockheed Martin had generated $7.27 billion in profits for most recent fiscal year, that it did $47.26 billion in arms and military services sales in 2018, and that 88 per cent of its total sales were from selling arms.

Lockheed Martin has posted that its products include the Dual Mode Laser Guided Bomb, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, Multiple Launch Rocket System, the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, and the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet.

Toronto’s NOW Magazine has previously reported, “Lockheed Martin has [also] spent millions lobbying legislators in Washington to pursue such costly and dangerous initiatives as NATO expansion and Missile Defense.”

On February 14, 2020, Fintel, which “provides advanced research tools for data-driven investors”, posted that the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) now holds USD $53.7 million in holdings in Lockheed Martin as of December 31, 2019.

Other CPP investments in the arms industry

World Beyond War has also noted that the Canada Pension Plan is also invested in these arms manufacturers: General Electric ($146 million), Boeing ($50 million), Northrop Grumman ($36 million), Raytheon ($21 million), General Dynamics ($19 million) and BAE Systems ($9 million) among other companies.

The Ottawa-based Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade further notes that as of May 2017, the CPP had invested “$1.4 Billion in 41 of the World’s Top-100 War Industries.”

COAT coordinator Richard Sanders has commented, “The companies that are fuelling our pensions sell everything from warships, attack helicopters, and bomber warplanes, to the missiles, rockets, and bombs they wield.”

“They also churn out a bewildering array of deadly hardware, from ammunition, small arms and machine guns to tanks, troop carriers, and artillery howitzers.”

“And, lest we forget, these companies profit from the production of scores of the high-tech systems for everything from military communications and weapons guidance to mass surveillance and enemy targeting systems.”

The Divest from the War Machine coalition, that includes World Beyond War, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Nonviolent Peaceforce, Christian Peacemaker Teams, War Resisters League and CodePink, have produced this Divest List that includes Lockheed Martin and other arms manufacturers.

Peace Brigades International (PBI) was founded in 1981 to undertake the task of peace-keeping, peace-making and peace-building under the discipline of nonviolence. Waterloo, Ontario-based Project Ploughshares notes that the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the Martin-built B-29 Enola Gay bomber had a profound effect on Murray Thomson who co-founded PBI on Grindstone Island (on Algonquin territory in Ontario) in 1981.