In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, Andrew Lawton talks about Justin Trudeau's desperation tour, anti-semitism on campus, and why going woke for corporations does not mean making more money.
00:08:11.880There is a range of issues around foreign interference
00:08:15.980that our security agencies, that our various institutions are engaged in.
00:08:23.320We know that foreign actors are trying to interfere in all different parties
00:08:30.420in many different ways and protecting the integrity of our parliamentary system
00:08:35.980and of people who choose to step forward in Parliament from false or misleading accusations
00:08:41.760that may well be the goal of some of those countries wishing to interfere.
00:08:45.980is requiring a level of thoughtfulness that is not always conducive to selling newspapers or headlines,
00:08:54.040but is what a responsible government must do to continue to engage in foreign interference.
00:09:00.600And I'll remind you, we are the government that has brought in more measures, more structures,
00:09:07.280more ways to deal with foreign interference than any other, because no other government ever did anything on that.
00:09:13.520so it's fascinating to me because on one hand first off he was just remarkably unprepared
00:09:20.640because jagmeet singh had said that quite a while before that interview as i understand it
00:09:25.020and justin trudeau is seemingly so baffled by that oh no no party is immune from this that
00:09:30.500would include his own well why has he not made any moves why has no one been removed from caucus why
00:09:36.020on one hand is he saying ah yes no one should be uh feel safe here and on the other hand sending
00:09:41.220out dominic leblanc to say well we've got concerns with how the nsi cop came to its conclusions we've
00:09:46.820got concerns with the report the liberals are looking to be the party that has stood to benefit
00:09:51.620the most from foreign interference in canadian democracy part of this is because foreign actors
00:09:57.140that want to infiltrate canadian institutions will of course back the winner which for the last
00:10:01.700three elections has been the liberals but more crucially and i think this is the really significant
00:10:07.300point here the liberals have been the most ideologically on side certainly when it comes to
00:10:13.620china and china's interest the liberals have not taken the view on china that most nations
00:10:19.620that value their sovereignty would and that certainly in the past the conservatives have
00:10:23.860taken up so again i'm not at all saying that foreign interference does not affect different
00:10:29.140parties i'm saying that if you're foreign interfering if you're foreignly interfering
00:10:33.380if you're an interfering foreigner, whatever the term is, if you are trying to meddle in Canadian
00:10:37.640democracy, as I've remarked, you're not exactly going to get much bang for your buck in going
00:10:42.700after Elizabeth May or Jagmeet Singh. So you're basically going to go after one of the two parties
00:10:48.160that has historically held victory in this country that has held office. And in the last three
00:10:52.900elections, the Liberals have been the winners. So this is where Canadians should look at this and be
00:10:57.980very very nervous about a prime minister that is not willing to be transparent a prime minister who
00:11:03.900could as we talked about yesterday on his own effectively with a stroke of a pen disclose the
00:11:10.460names release the unredacted report but instead he has chosen not to so justin trudeau when he
00:11:18.860comes out there and says oh well canadians are not in a decision mode right now that's the only reason
00:11:23.980were not coming across well in the polls no canadians are not supporting you and your party
00:11:28.460in the polls because you have just been bungling every single file that you have had your hands on
00:11:33.820you've had the reverse midas touch for i'd say certainly the last five years some would say you
00:11:38.460know the last nine years that the liberals have been in power and foreign interference an issue
00:11:43.020that really comes down to the core question of canada's democracy and we're going to be delving
00:11:47.900into this on thursday in a longer interview with brian lee crowley this is something where the
00:11:53.260liberals have once again decided to turn a blind eye to it they have turned a blind eye to it
00:11:58.620they have chosen to keep things shrouded in secrecy instead of this government that said
00:12:03.820it was going to be the most transparent government to ever happen in the face of the earth amazing
00:12:08.380how far we have fallen from that the government that said it was going to overhaul access to
00:12:13.180information and transparency and openness and has now fought canadians in court has fought the
00:12:18.620the Speaker of the House in court has fought time and time again to keep the government closed off,
00:12:24.180to keep information closed off. And it isn't just on foreign interference. It was on SNC-Lavalin.
00:12:30.040It's on their carbon tax. They don't even want Canadians to see the economic analysis of the
00:12:35.960carbon tax for crying out loud. A government that can't be transparent about its tax policy
00:12:41.040cannot be transparent about anything else. And this is why Canadians have, for several other
00:12:47.180reasons, turned on a government that was once welcomed with such open arms. I want to turn to
00:12:53.800an issue that has become very near and dear to my heart, not as a Jewish person, but as someone who
00:12:58.380has a great deal of love for the Jewish people and a great deal of sympathy for all they've had
00:13:03.200to endure over the years and over the last nine months in particular. It's no longer news to talk
00:13:09.800about anti-Semitism on campus. Things that a year ago or two years ago would have been front page
00:13:14.300News are now relegated to the back pages because we just expect on universities people to say
00:13:19.660horrendous things about Israel and the Jewish people. Just last week we learned that McGill
00:13:24.980University's dissidents, their anti-Israel group, were going to be hosting a summer camp. Oh that
00:13:31.540sounds so charming. What summer camp is this? Well it is a summer camp for quote-unquote
00:13:36.900revolutionaries and this is the youth summer program. Now when I went to a summer camp I think
00:13:42.320the graphic might have been uh kids playing with bubbles or kids uh you know paying playing hopscotch
00:13:47.860and the chalk or maybe kids doing that parachute game where you lift the parachute up in the air
00:13:52.640and you sit under it uh but these youth summer campers uh well i see them all wearing kathiyas
00:13:58.080uh they're reading i don't know if those are quran's or if it's the new hunger games book
00:14:03.620that suzanne collins has coming out uh one of them is holding what appears to be uh well it's
00:14:09.100firearm of some kind i don't know uh what kind exactly it's a little blurry there maybe an ak-47
00:14:14.300of sorts but this is what they're promoting this summer camp has been widely condemned although
00:14:20.860by all accounts it will still be going on because it doesn't happen with any official standing
00:14:25.020heck maybe they'll even get some canada summer jobs funding from the government who knows
00:14:29.340but one group that has been conspicuously silent throughout all of this has has been the group you
00:14:33.900would expect to be the most vocal about this the jewish studies programs on university campuses
00:14:39.900now when i was at university i took a class on the jewish history of north america which was a
00:14:45.580fascinating class i learned a great deal about how integrated jews were in the historic and
00:14:51.100cultural fabric of canadian and american society and there were a lot of programs just like that
00:14:56.540around the country and a lot of professors in these spaces that have not been speaking up about
00:15:00.940this. Barbara Kaye wrote about this in a piece of the National Post where she is
00:15:04.840one of my favorite columnists and I suspect one of yours as well if you read
00:15:08.660there. Barbara always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today. It's a
00:15:12.380pleasure to be here Andrew thanks for having me. So I'll start I let's accept
00:15:16.900your premise at face value because I think you're very correct about this I
00:15:20.200have not seen a large and vocal condemnation from these or any other
00:15:24.520academic groups but is this coming from a tacit or explicit agreement with these
00:15:30.640activists or is it coming from fear that these professors do not want to stick their necks out
00:15:35.760and be even further marginalized well first i should say that uh although jewish studies you're
00:15:41.600correct the jewish studies departments have been institutionally pretty mute uh there have been
00:15:48.000many individual jewish academics who have been quite vocal but they are vocal as individuals or
00:15:56.400as part of some very um ad hoc uh networks academic writers networks and they write op-eds
00:16:03.040and they you know write for all kinds of publications i have no core but they tend to
00:16:07.760be the pariahs for doing well either they're let's just say that they're out there on their own
00:16:15.040i mean i don't think they're condemned uh in their you know professionally i don't think they face
00:16:20.640cancellation within their departments uh but institutionally the jewish studies departments
00:16:26.960and the jewish studies the association of jewish studies uh which is an american organization i'm
00:16:32.480not sure if it covers uh canada as well they have been um not only uh not vocal uh in opposition
00:16:43.280to all this uh anti-zionist and anti-jewish activity uh but they are officially one might say
00:16:51.200sympathetic to the anti-zionist movement many of them some of them are active in the bds movement
00:16:58.560just i'll give you one example um a former rabbi in my synagogue in montreal described this to a
00:17:04.880group of us uh at a learning day at our synagogue he said he had he had when he'd been a rabbi and
00:17:11.840And then he had taught in the Jewish Studies Department at Drew University.
00:17:15.380And he said he went to, this was two years ago, he went to the annual conference of Jewish Studies, the Association of Jewish Studies, which is for that discipline.
00:17:24.780And he said the theme of the conference was justice.
00:17:29.900And he said the major push of the conference was justice for the Palestinians.
00:17:37.080And he described one exhibit, an artistic exhibit that was a series of photographs of Palestinian children, only you didn't see their faces.
00:17:46.180You just saw their outstretched arms and on their arms they had with Sharpies written, you know, tattooed numbers, which I don't have to tell you is a Holocaust inversion tactic of just the lowest and the really very undignified.
00:18:06.060and very hurtful, needless to say, to those who remember the Holocaust
00:18:11.220or who have had relatives killed in the Holocaust.
00:18:13.380So this idea of using the Holocaust against ourselves
00:18:17.440in order to whip up a sentiment of a very acute level for Palestinians
00:18:26.660as opposed to, and this is the kind of thing you see quite often,
00:18:31.020And it comes under the heading of what I would call pathological altruism, in which you're so concerned with the harms that your side of a conflict is causing to the other side that you won't take your own side.
00:18:49.400You know, what was that definition of a liberal? Someone who won't take his own side in an argument? Anyways.
00:18:54.680yeah and i would also point out too that studying something you know women's studies gender studies
00:19:02.500you know jewish studies all of these things it doesn't necessarily mean that there is a support
00:19:08.760for the group being studied i think you know one example of this there was i forget the name of the
00:19:13.380university but there was like some men's studies department that was launched and you looked at the
00:19:17.180uh faculty for it and it was like every single one of them i think probably hated men more than
00:19:22.180anything else in the world and you know jewish studies that you used to see a lot of jewish
00:19:27.300professors in there but a lot of them are not necessarily zionists and and again nor should
00:19:32.900they be necessarily there shouldn't be a litmus test if you're able to teach the material and
00:19:36.900teach it well but the reality there is that a lot of these departments a lot of the social sciences
00:19:43.060in general have all been taken over by this oppressor oppressed dynamic and when you can't
00:19:49.140even teach math or chemistry without talking about decolonizing their curricula uh certainly
00:19:54.340in jewish studies you're seeing those very same dynamics and i think that's why a lot of these
00:19:57.940departments have been so silent on this well i agree with you and i i think the this whole the
00:20:04.020the whole um rubric under way of intersectionality in which jews are routinely excluded uh they are
00:20:13.140not considered intersectionality is of course the intersectionality of all victims the oppressed
00:20:21.060and jews are never included in the category of the oppressed they are always part of the oppressor
00:20:26.980group so it it sort of conflates jews with um their state and as you say uh many jews are not
00:20:34.900particularly zionist but when jews in authority over other students or in a position of authority
00:20:41.140over students and they're in a Jewish studies program become actively anti-Zionist or are part
00:20:47.680of the BDS movement or are teaching anti-Zionism rather than teaching it as part of, you know,
00:20:56.940history and here's the situation today and here is when Zionism, the concept started and who
00:21:05.920started it and who was for it and who was against it. That's history. But once you already have a
00:21:10.740Jewish state, and Zionism obviously won the argument, you can't keep arguing that Zionism
00:21:21.620is a curse, as Naomi Klein has called it. You cannot say it must be ended. How do you end
00:21:30.000Zionism? You would have to end Israel in order to end Zionism. So it's a very different kettle
00:21:35.540of fish last night uh the monk debates andrew um i don't know if you saw them but anyways uh
00:21:40.980wonderful international lawyer natasha uh hausdorf teamed up with douglas murray the in
00:21:46.100the incredible douglas murray and they were discussing this very thing and um natasha said
00:21:52.100look uh you don't have to be a zionist but but think of it as this way it's like if a mother
00:21:58.820and a father or sorry if if two parents a man and a woman get married and they they say they don't
00:22:03.700want to have children they've they both agree they don't want to have children but by accident
00:22:08.980they have a child you don't you don't agree that it's okay to murder the child i mean because they
00:22:14.900didn't want it right like so we have a state with seven million jews in it that's half the world's
00:22:19.940population and for anybody in jewish studies today to be arguing that not only was zionism a mistake
00:22:26.900but it's a mistake that has to be rectified then you have to be very careful with your words what
00:22:31.300What do you mean? It was a mistake. And now the state of Israel is illegitimate for that reason.
00:22:37.660You know, I'd be happy if all kinds of movements that ended up in national movements that, you know, had been considered illegitimate before they became nations.
00:22:50.860Israel was created as a nation along with many other nations in the Middle East.
00:22:55.360nationalism was not a thing a century ago and it became a thing so this i this idea that you could
00:23:04.880just loosely play with the idea of yeah you know zion is a big mistake uh let's try something else
00:23:11.980and and there's something else that a lot of jewish studies professors are into now
00:23:16.440is this thing called diasporism which is yeah zionism was a big mistake uh you know what
00:23:23.100uh we need to be jews who uh we we we repudiate zionism and uh it's good jews were meant to live
00:23:32.720in exile because their their rationale is uh uh it is unnatural for jews to have power over anybody
00:23:42.140else okay for other people when you have a very very extreme subset of orthodox jews that believes
00:23:47.740that but it's an incredible incredible minority there it's there's it's so fringe that i i never
00:23:53.340even include the natura carta people are like um they're crazy people uh i i consider them literally
00:24:00.380crazy they are living in such a bubble of and they are have no influence whatsoever except in so far
00:24:07.340as they are used as tools uh you know by palestinian the palestinian isms and um yeah i mean but but
00:24:17.260nobody no jew i know ever even mentions them in a calculus of uh where are we going and what's
00:24:23.500happening in the world they they are beyond beyond the pale so beyond the pale that orthodox jews
00:24:31.100want nothing to do with them and even chabad and all these other people they they're off the map
00:24:36.540but we're talking now about very mainstream people uh who do have influence and authority in
00:24:41.820in universities, they're academics. They are in, you know, institutions like Hillel and
00:24:47.860all kinds of places where young Jews look to them as models and authority figures. And they're saying
00:24:55.140we should be happy in exile. We should not have power over other people. We've misused it.
00:25:02.340But everybody else is allowed to have power over Jews. I mean, if we should be happy to live in
00:25:10.980exile then we're basically saying we we are um contracting out our right to have power over
00:25:17.720anybody and and but you can have power over us you can have power over us but we can't have power
00:25:22.100over anybody else so how did that work out for us throughout history not so well not not that you
00:25:28.140know i i was about to ask you you know what what jews think of a certain subject and then as i was
00:25:32.500doing so the old joke of you know three jews and five opinions come to mind is that you know jews
00:25:36.820can't even necessarily agree with themselves, let alone each other on a lot of matters.
00:25:39.700Well, that's true. But the upside of that is, it's both an upside and a downside. The upside is
00:25:44.740we grant anybody in Israel, here, any Jew can say what's on his mind or her mind without fear
00:25:54.760of getting bumped off or even spat at or getting doxed on. I mean, we allow perfect freedom of
00:26:04.760expression within our people and our people we are we are bonded not as christians are by belief
00:26:13.100we are bonded by peoplehood so we admit to without resentment yeah there's super orthodox and there's
00:26:22.400totally secular there's atheists and there's this and that we don't care we don't care what we care
00:26:27.260about is your uh your commitment to jewish peoplehood and to um uh furthering the healthy
00:26:37.860interests of the jewish people now you that that doesn't mean you have to support israel and
00:26:43.400everything that israel does you don't have to support zionism you don't have to support any
00:26:46.880of that but it doesn't give you license to align yourself with the enemies of the jewish people
00:26:53.480And to say, yeah, you've got the right idea. Yeah. Eliminating Israel. Good idea. And that's what, you know, these groups like Independent Jewish Voices and Jewish Voices for Peace, they're using their status as Jews to join in the chorus of voices that wish Jews would disappear from the face of the earth.
00:27:17.700And they are abetting them and giving comfort to them and saying, speaking as a Jew or, yeah, my grandmother, who's dead, unfortunately, in the Holocaust, would have approved.
00:27:29.640That's that's something that you see people like, you know, I've seen Jews say, oh, she she definitely would have been on on BDS.
00:27:38.540She definitely would have been ashamed of what Israel's doing.
00:27:42.820These are the same as the Christians that say, you know, Jesus would have been trans or something. You see all of this weird revisionism. But I wanted to ask you about that, Barbara, because there is, to use the language and worldview of the left here, which talks about privilege as, you know, basically meriting or taking away the merit of your position.
00:28:03.300And a lot of the Jews that do this, I've seen, are ones that have tremendous amounts of privilege.
00:28:09.320They are Jews that have not had to deal with anti-Semitism, or at least not that I would see.
00:28:14.400They're Jews that oftentimes are coming from very upper middle class, if not outright wealthy families.
00:28:19.960And you see this in other groups as well.
00:28:21.780I mean, the number of environmental activists whose parents are these billionaires or something is insane.
00:28:28.480But that doesn't really matter when you're saying the quote-unquote right things.
00:28:33.120in the same way that all of the indigenization of curricula now and the importance of connecting to
00:28:39.520your people to history doesn't apply to jews because jews are also bound by their history
00:28:44.880and by their connection to the land that we now call israel but that that deep connection doesn't
00:28:50.240matter when you have been maligned as the quote-unquote oppressor that's right you i mean
00:28:55.200you can you can say uh oh uh as some diasporas do they say oh yeah all that stuff about uh
00:29:01.520next year in jerusalem and uh my heart belongs to zion and all that that's just romantic stuff
00:29:07.040it's like a metaphor it doesn't literally mean that uh jews have to be attached to the land of
00:29:12.640israel well sorry but it does and and if you want to detach yourself from the jews i don't care you
00:29:18.000know say i'm not a jew anymore i'm out of here fine all i ask is you know what don't dump on
00:29:24.400the rest of us and don't don't help other people who would really like to see us disappear uh is
00:29:29.840that too much to ask really and don't say speaking as a jew uh you know even trotsky in in in in the
00:29:36.800soviet union uh he he uh his name used to be lev bronstein uh but he didn't say speaking as a jew
00:29:44.240i'm a party member and i i believe that uh you know jews should be uh uh persecuted people like
00:29:52.400just you know decide one or the other i'm not with you i'm out of this people
00:29:56.400goodbye good luck and you know i'll just go my own way but the privileged jews you're talking
00:30:02.400about yes they're the university crowd uh they want to be part of the herd they've bought into
00:30:06.960the whole intersectional thing they've bought the whole uh and they're very full of self-righteousness
00:30:11.360they see themselves as a new prophets um and they are using their they're weaponizing their their
00:30:17.360status their social sociological status uh as jews uh to abet a perniciously anti-semitic
00:30:26.880movement uh and then there's the the jews that are just plain ignorant and they're
00:30:31.440what i call useful idiots who go along because they get all their news from tick tock and they
00:30:37.440um they're incurious they don't know anything about history they they know nothing and they're just
00:30:43.040they're foolish silly people they need a cause they're looking for something they they they have
00:30:48.160no connection to their jewish history or past or communities uh no no deep connection anyways and
00:30:54.720and uh they don't have a cause so they're looking um and in a way they they feel they're this is a
00:31:01.840social justice cause they've been trained to think that way they think that is that that
00:31:07.600israel is a colonialist state which it isn't it isn't an apartheid these are all
00:31:12.320libels but they believe them why shouldn't they their propaganda mill uh you know the the bds
00:31:18.560crowd their propaganda mill is phenomenal because they don't have to worry about studying or doing
00:31:24.000anything constructive in life this is their whole life is is relentless propagandizing against
00:31:32.080israel and the jews well i appreciate it very much and like i've said to you in the past barbara i'm
00:31:38.880so grateful you continue to use your voice in the way that you do when there are so many costs to
00:31:44.400doing so in this day and age and i appreciate it very much barbara k thank you thank you andrew
00:31:49.280all right thanks again always good to chat with barbara k could not no natural segue from that
00:31:54.160to our next subject i was going to try to think of one but i just couldn't so i'm moving on we're
00:31:58.000doing when i used to work in talk radio i like you could just throw to the commercial break and not
00:32:01.680not have to worry about the segue but i do want to talk about esg because this is something we
00:32:05.880hear a lot of environmental social governance it's often done by companies that want to look
00:32:11.260woke and say that they're being progressive and you see it tied in with things like the
00:32:15.880sustainable development goals and all of these other things and you often hear people sell esg
00:32:21.400because every company wants a good esg score people saying that it actually is good for business
00:32:27.200too that it's not selling out the bottom line it's not negative to the shareholders well a new
00:32:32.360study from the Fraser Institute casts doubt on that it says there is not in fact any evidence
00:32:36.560supporting a positive correlation between ESG ratings and stock market returns this looks at
00:32:42.460310 companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange the study author joins me now Stephen Globerman
00:32:48.340senior fellow at the Fraser Institute Stephen good to have you on the show thanks for coming on today
00:32:53.280thank you for having me so just for people that aren't as familiar with this
00:32:57.680what is an esg score and what are companies doing to boost their number
00:33:04.560sees that rate the company's performance along those dimensions environmental activity
00:33:12.960social activity which is related to who you're hiring how much you're paying your employees
00:33:21.200and governance which is related to how the company is is is run and uh the rating agencies use uh
00:33:29.440different specific measures along those three dimensions and then aggregate these measures
00:33:35.040to come up with an overall rating for a company uh and uh companies um uh pay for these rating
00:33:43.680uh services because in part they use it to promote uh their their in their performance their their
00:33:50.640sustainability performance, just to use a broad term to cover those dimensions.
00:33:58.000Investment managers use those ratings to promote their ESG mutual funds and exchange traded funds
00:34:08.780to generate business from investors who are concerned about those issues when they place
00:34:16.640their money in different types of assets.
00:34:18.600and you've looked at 310 companies on the tsx you've looked at their stock market returns and
00:34:26.120find no correlation whatsoever positive or negative between the two correct well let me just
00:34:32.280uh clarify one point which is an important point what what we look at is the change in the esg
00:34:39.800rating and then we relate that to stock market performance going forward and and the reason
00:34:46.440that's an important qualification is that a stock price will change because new information about
00:34:56.200the company's ongoing prospects have changed. So the change in the rating is important because
00:35:04.740that really can be considered new information about a company's ESG profile. And if investors
00:35:12.420are really concerned about ESG profile, then it's the new information that they're going to react
00:35:18.380to. And yes, what we did was we looked at the relationship between the change in the ESG rating
00:35:25.960across our sample of companies and the performance, the stock performance, which includes, by the way,
00:35:33.360dividend payments and any stock splits over the next up to 12 months beyond the rating change,
00:35:41.480which seems a reasonable amount of time to expect investors to react to that new information.
00:35:48.560And as you said, there's no statistically significant relationship,
00:35:54.860meaning any relationship we saw could be due to chance with relative confidence.
00:36:03.040As we know, stock market returns themselves can be very fickle.
00:36:07.220They're often influenced by a company's profitability, but not exclusively so.
00:36:11.100And you're not looking at a company's financial, you're not looking at a company's profitability specifically, you're looking at the stock market return.
00:36:19.400So have you in other studies you've seen in the US, because I know this hasn't really been done in Canada, seen a relationship between changes in ESG scores and how much a company is making one way or another?
00:36:31.320Well, you're quite right that the focus of most of the studies, including our study, our recent study, is on stock market returns.
00:36:40.620But the reason you want to look at stock market returns is because you can't observe future changes in profitability looking at accounting statements.
00:36:49.940The stock market return, and particularly the change in the price of a stock, reflects what the broad millions of investors think is the future profitability outlook for the company.
00:37:06.100So looking at the stock market, changing the stock market price is really effectively looking at expectations about future profitability, which are not observable if you look at the counting statements.
00:37:20.740Now, you might say, well, why not do a very long time series study and look at changes in future profitability?
00:37:27.940Well, that could be another piece of research, but it's not just the stock price change.
00:37:35.280It's also because many ESG proponents argue it reduces the risk of a company.
00:37:41.900And so it's the risk adjusted returns that you want to look at.
00:37:47.720And we have controls for that in our study, controls for the risk profile of the company.
00:37:55.760So what we're looking at is the stock market's expectation of future profitability adjusted for expected risk.
00:38:02.840one one of the things that and i realize you're a scientist you're following the numbers here
00:38:08.300you're not trying to you know make the numbers fit a thesis but there are going to be people
00:38:12.260that are very hostile to the esg score and the whole regime there that say okay well there's
00:38:17.640no point and there are going to be people that are supportive of it that say okay well it doesn't
00:38:21.340cost them anything so it can't hurt well it does cost uh and and that's an important point uh in
00:38:28.760In fact, there was a piece yesterday in Globe and Mail where a CEO of a small Canadian company was referencing the significant cost to his company of complying with ESG reporting requirements.
00:38:46.320So, yes, the issue really does ultimately boil down to what are the costs and benefits of setting up a regulatory environment where all this reporting has to be done so ESG ratings can be created if there doesn't seem to be a relationship between ESG ratings and basically the efficiency performance of the company.
00:39:12.340yeah and i think that's a very significant point and you have i mean i've seen this covering the
00:39:18.580world economic forum meetings in davos you have all of these companies that are bending over
00:39:23.760backwards to meet these targets and they're you know integrating with all of these different
00:39:27.560agencies and you've created this entire industry on esg consulting and esg like all of this and
00:39:34.320people are making huge money on this uh the shareholders aren't though well the shareholders
00:39:40.240Are not. And of course, it raises an obvious question. Why are people investing in ESG themed mutual funds? They're paying higher fees to invest in those funds. They don't appear to be getting the net returns that people who are getting who are investing in conventional asset categories. Why do they do this?
00:40:03.240And really, all you can say, I think, with any kind of reasoned analysis is that there are non-financial benefits that are being realized by these investors, whether it's feel good that we're doing something good for the environment or we're addressing income inequality or racial discrimination.