Caledon farmer among four climate activists taking Canada Pension Plan manager to court

When Rav Singh decided to farm vegetables in Caledon five years ago, after years of working as an environmental educator, she saw it as a way to honour her ancestry. Her parents were farmers in India before immigrating to Canada, and reconnecting with the land felt like a return to her roots, growing many of the foods her family has eaten for centuries. 

It was eventually also a bridge between food and climate justice.

“I just felt really called to connect with the land on a very deep level and to grow food for people,” Singh told The Pointer.

“I wanted to respect and acknowledge my ancestral connection to agriculture in farming because my family, they were farmers back in India…I just really wanted to make sure that folks who were looking for ‘cultural foods’ like okra, bitter melon had the same type of choice that people have when they go to buy something like tomatoes or cucumbers.”

At 27, she founded Shade of Miti, “miti” meaning soil in both Hindi and Punjabi, a name that pays tribute to her ancestors and her belief that the health of the planet begins beneath our feet.

That belief extends beyond her farm.

Rav Singh runs Shade of Miti, a farm, food and climate justice organization based on Treaty 13 land in Southern Caledon. The farm is dedicated to supporting communities ready to create sovereign and just food systems resilient to climate change.

(Alexis Wright/The Pointer files) 

Singh has been active in the climate justice space for years, and it was through that work that she connected with three other young activists including Aliya Hirji from British Columbia, Travis Olson from Alberta and Chloe Tse from Ontario. 

Their conversations about the climate crisis eventually turned to a topic most people their age rarely think about: retirement.

“I personally think a lot of young people, including myself included, never have really thought about retirement, deeply,” Singh said.

“For me personally, when I started my own business and started farming, I really started to pay attention to where my money was going, how it was being used, who was holding it, and I found that in most cases how my money is being held and being used doesn't align with my personal values.” 

On October 27, the four announced they were filing a notice of application at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice against the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), the country’s largest pension manager and sixth largest globally, handling more than $732 billion in assets for more than 22 million Canadians.

Their claim: CPPIB is failing to protect their pensions from climate risk by continuing to invest in fossil fuel expansion and underestimating the financial dangers of a warming planet.

“Our case is alleging that CPP Investments is mismanaging our pension fund by failing to adequately respond to climate change. CPP is supposed to be one of our most reliable sources of retirement income. We should all be concerned that our CPP benefits may not be as dependable as we’d like to think,” Singh explained.

The lawsuit, supported by Ecojustice, marks the first time a major Canadian financial institution has been accused of mismanaging climate-related financial risks. It’s also believed to be the first globally to argue that a pension fund manager breached its duty of impartiality, the obligation to act fairly toward younger generations whose retirements will be most affected by the climate crisis.

For Singh and her co-applicants, the case is not an attack on the Canada Pension Plan, it’s a demand for accountability.

“It's really scary,” Hirji said.

“I think we are all genuinely worried about our ability to retire, especially as our financial institutions continue financing the climate crisis.” 

Hirji says she has been working with Canadian pension recipients who are “against fossil fuel investments” for a quarter of her life. 

“So, getting involved in this case was like the natural next step for all of us,” she told The Pointer.

“This comes from a place of a bit of fear, but also a lot of care. I really care about all the people who are recipients of this pension, and I really, really didn't want it to have to go to this point. But I want to retire on a livable pension, into a livable world, and this is what needed to happen.” 

The young activists aren’t seeking compensation. Instead, they want the court to declare that CPPIB must properly assess, manage, and disclose climate risks and stop exposing contributors to an “undue risk of loss”, a legal term that appears in more than 40 Canadian laws but has never before been tested in court.

Ecojustice lawyer Karine Peloffy, who is leading the legal team, says the case targets CPPIB’s core responsibilities under Canadian law.

“The case alleges that CPP Investments is breaching its legal duties by failing to properly identify, assess, and manage climate-related financial risks,” Peloffy told The Pointer. 

“That includes misrepresenting and failing to disclose material information about those risks.”

Ecojustice argues that these actions violate statutory obligations requiring CPPIB to manage assets “in the best interest of contributors and beneficiaries” and to invest without undue risk of loss.

“What is specific about this case is its focus on the long-term impact…we are centering the case a lot on the duty of impartiality and even-handedness, to act fairly across generations of contributors and beneficiaries,” Peloffy explained.

That means protecting the interests of young contributors who won’t retire until after 2050, when climate change is expected to create severe economic shocks if serious mitigation steps aren’t taken now.

“We're saying it’s (CPP Investments) statutorily prohibited from investing in fossil fuel expansion that contributes to catastrophic climate change,” she said.

“And we focus the case a lot on systemic impacts of climate change, that is the impacts that will ensue across society and across the economy.”

As one of the largest investors on the planet, CPPIB holds shares across nearly every sector of the global economy. That makes it what Peloffy calls a “universal owner”, an investor whose portfolio represents the economy itself.

“Because climate change affects every sector, you can’t diversify away from that risk. It’s systemic. So a fund like CPPIB can’t both profit from and protect against climate breakdown at the same time,” she explained.

The case builds on mounting warnings from environmental and financial experts. 

On August 28, Ecojustice, on behalf of advocacy group Shift: Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health, sent a letter to Chief Actuary Assia Billig, accusing the Office of the Chief Actuary (OCA) of dangerously underplaying the financial risks climate change poses to the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Public Sector Pension Plan (PSPP).

Their letter warned that failing to credibly assess climate-related risks could have “reverberating and detrimental impacts” on the financial sustainability of the pension system. 

In May, CPPIB’s annual report celebrated its growing portfolio of $714 billion in assets, strong 9.3 percent annual returns, and a confident projection to surpass $1 trillion by 2031. 

Experts warn such optimism is built on fragile ground.

“They bragged about getting a clean bill of health on the future,” Shift: Action for Pension Wealth & Planet Health executive director Adam Scott said. 

“But you can’t say the plan is sustainable for 75 years without considering climate. It’s the single biggest systemic risk to the global economy.”

Hirji says it’s “terrifying” that young Canadians like her could lose up to 50 percent of their returns by the time they retire.

In a November 2024 report, Ortec Finance examined the climate risk exposure of five major pension systems, including those in the U.S. and Canada, and warned that North American pension funds could see a drop of 50 percent or more in investment returns by 2040 if global temperatures rise by 3.7 degrees Celsius under a business-as-usual scenario.

(Climate risks facing the pension industry worldwide/Ortec Finance)

At the centre of the lawsuit is CPPIB’s use of the MSCI Climate Value-at-Risk (CVaR) model, a risk tool that Ecojustice lawyers describe as a “black box” incapable of capturing the real-world threats of climate breakdown.

According to CPPIB’s own climate scenario analysis, even under a catastrophic three degrees Celsius warming, its portfolio would lose only four percent in value.

Major global investors like Norway’s sovereign wealth fund and Denmark’s AkademikerPension have criticized the model for producing “implausibly low” loss estimates under extreme climate scenarios.

Global warming is projected to trigger a range of interconnected risk factors, which will, in turn, affect financial markets and the solvency of financial institutions. In response, experts have been urging firms to develop qualitative climate scenarios to explore how these cascading risks could unfold and identify possible mitigation strategies. Visual tools, such as flood maps, can help illustrate the stark differences between areas that would be impacted under a 1.5 degrees Celsius scenario compared to a more extreme four degrees Celsius scenario.

(The Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios report)

Experts argue these flaws reveal a deeper issue: an institutional denial of how climate chaos undermines financial systems. Pension funds, insurance companies, and governments rely on long-term economic growth but that growth depends on ecological stability.

Scott explained since most of the growth of a pension fund comes from the growth of the overall economy, if the global economy shrinks because of climate chaos, pensions shrink with it.

“CPP Investments has largely ignored those warnings (to take the escalating financial risks of climate change seriously), continuing to invest billions of dollars in coal, oil, gas and pipelines that lock us into a dangerous future,” Scott said in a statement.

CPP Investments committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 in 2022, but quietly abandoned that goal in spring 2025. Despite publicly recognizing climate change as a “material investment risk,” the fund continues to invest billions in oil, gas, and coal.

In 2024, CPPIB reported 3.5 percent of its portfolio, roughly $22.6 billion, was invested in fossil fuels. 

Shift estimates the true exposure could be nearly double once pipelines, utilities and related infrastructure are included.

“The science is crystal clear that fossil fuels cannot expand and must be phased out to avoid catastrophic climate change, but CPP Investments managers continue to put their heads in the sand. CPP Investments most basic duty to invest in our best interest requires them to invest in a stable climate,” Scott noted.

Hirji says many young people already feel climate anxiety. But realizing that their own money is being used to bankroll the crisis, that’s another layer of “fear”.  

CPP Investments has defended its strategy, pointing to its investments in renewables and a “whole-economy transition” approach. 

But, as reported previously by The Pointer, even its own reports admit that its assumptions are “subject to uncertainty and may not prove to be correct.”

“CPP Investments touts its sustainable energy portfolio but that portfolio includes a significant proportion of fossil fuel companies,” Peloffy said.

“They claim their carbon footprint is declining, but they don’t count Scope Three emissions…the emissions from burning the fossil fuels they invest in. That’s about 80 percent of the total emissions from those companies.”

She stops short of calling it outright greenwashing, but the case alleges misrepresentation of material information, an issue echoing international rulings.

In a historical decision underscoring the growing scrutiny of corporate sustainability claims, a French court penalized energy and petroleum company, TotalEnergies, for misleading consumers with deceptive greenwashing statements this month. 

The ruling marks the first application of France’s greenwashing law to an energy company and requires TotalEnergies to remove all references to its “carbon neutrality by 2050” ambitions and other misleading sustainability claims from its website, or face daily fines of up to 20,000 euros. 

The company has also been ordered to pay 8,000 euros in damages to each of the three non-government organizations including Friends of the Earth France, Greenpeace France, and Notre Affaire à Tous that brought the case, as well as cover their legal costs. 

The court found that by invoking the Paris Climate Accords while continuing to expand oil and gas production, TotalEnergies misled the public into believing its operations aligned with global climate goals. 

A separate criminal investigation into the company’s environmental claims is still ongoing, reinforcing the mounting pressure on major emitters to match rhetoric with real emissions reductions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a 133-page advisory opinion at the Peace Palace in The Hague, advising that countries have a duty to prevent harm to the climate. The court warned that failure to fulfill this obligation could lead to legal consequences, including financial compensation and other forms of restitution.

“Failure of a state to take an appropriate action to protect the climate system from GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, including through fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licenses, or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies, may constitute an internationally wrongful act, which is attributable to that state,” ICJ president YÅ«ji Iwasawa said, reading out the court’s decision.

When asked whether the ICJ ruling can impact the four applicants’ case here in Canada, Peloffy said: “sort of indirectly.”

“We’re not arguing that CPP Investments is an arm of the state, we’re treating it as a private actor with very specific legal duties,” she explained. 

“But it’s indirectly affected because one set of climate-related financial risks are transition risks, the risk that regulation, policy, technology, or behaviour will change to address the climate crisis. If states can be held liable for permitting or subsidizing fossil fuel projects, that could change the profitability of those projects and therefore affect investors such as CPP Investments.”

Peloffy noted that the case also touches on broader themes identified nearly a decade ago by Mark Carney, then Governor of the Bank of England, in his famous “Tragedy of the Horizon” speech. 

Carney outlined three categories of climate risk: transition risks, physical risks (like hurricanes, floods, and wildfires that are growing more intense), and liability risks, the threat that victims of climate change could seek compensation for the harms they have suffered or the costs of adapting.

“These liability cases have been proliferating around the world,” Peloffy said. 

In May, a German court ruling established that major greenhouse gas emitters can be held liable for the consequences of climate change, setting an important legal precedent despite dismissing Peruvian farmer Saúl Luciano Lliuya’s lawsuit against the German energy company RWE. Although the court found insufficient evidence to require RWE to fund flood protection at Lliuya’s home, it affirmed that companies may be held accountable under civil law for climate-related damages.

“If that kind of precedent shifts, there could be trillions in liability for the fossil fuel sector and that will absolutely impact their profitability,” Peloffy noted.

Research by the Oxford Sustainable Law Programme warned that investors are “flying blind” to this emerging liability risk, which could reshape the economics of the fossil fuel industry much like litigation once did for asbestos and tobacco.

For instance, Chevron, one of CPP Investments’ holdings, is currently facing 20 lawsuits in the U.S. from local governments seeking damages for climate adaptation costs.

Peloffy says she acknowledges the “challenges” in bringing new cases forward, but they are trying to “apply established principles of law that have been in our laws for a very long time to new and unprecedented facts.” 

“We never know how we're going to go, but we think we've built the best case we can, and we are looking forward to the court of pining and offering much needed clarification about the nature of duties in the face of catastrophic climate change.”

As for Rav Singh, she hopes the case “open(s) some more space for people to have conversations with their family or friends around climate related financial risks and what we can do to hold financial institutions like CPP investment accountable and, hopefully, get some more transparency.

“And work towards a better future that's climate secure and financial secure for all Canadians.”

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