The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) is no longer holding shares in CoreCivic and GEO Group, according to public disclosures. In a Wednesday tweet about the move, NDP MP Charlie Angus said he met with the pension plan in October 2018, and asked the firm to drop its investments in the detention-centre companies. “I challenged them to do better,” Angus tweeted. He said he told the CPPIB, “Canadians would not accept pension profits coming from these degrading detention centres.” The CPPIB declined to answer questions about whether Angus’ meeting influenced the firm’s investments or what prompted the dropping of the two companies. (The Logic)

Talking point: Angus isn’t claiming that the investments were dropped because of him, and the CPPIB isn’t commenting on what lead to the divestiture, which happened sometime between August 2018 and March 2019, the last time the CPPIB updated its public disclosures. The MP’s office told The Logic that Angus met with Tim Downing, the CPPIB’s director of federal and provincial affairs, in October 2018, but hasn’t been in touch with the fund in 2019. The CPPIB is designed to operate at arm’s length from government and the CPPIB Act outlines a number of safeguards to protect against political interference. The pension giant, which oversees over $350 billion in assets, never held particularly large stakes in either company. In late 2018, the CPPIB had about US$6 million in stakes in GEO Group and CoreCivic combined. When the investments became public in October 2018, CPPIB said it wasn’t an active choice, but rather an acquisition via an algorithm that automatically tries to diversify the CPPIB’s portfolio. It’s not just Angus who wanted the CPPIB to divest. At a public meeting in November 2018, protestors asked the CPPIB’s leadership to drop the firms, and two separate petitions attracted about 56,000 signatures combined.