加拿大养老金投资：国内与主权考量

主持人: When Prime Minister Mark Carney gave his history making speech at the World Economic Forum in January, Canada's pension funds got a shout out. Our pension funds are amongst the world's largest and most sophisticated investors. And he's not wrong. By the end of 2024, Canadian pension funds managed assets totalling nearly $2.5 trillion. That's trillion with a T. But here's the part that has some raising eyebrows. A lot of that money isn't being invested here in Canada. Take the Canadian Pension Plan, the largest pension fund in the country, 47% of its investments, which overall total more than $780 billion, are invested in the US. Just 13% are invested here at home. In a CBC analysis found. That's not unusual as we try to build up our economy through big ticket projects. Should Canadian pension funds be investing more in Canada? And what can we do to make that happen? Then we look at how to close loopholes in a Buy Canadian policies so we can keep the economic benefits right here at home. Welcome to The Rundown. Nuclear power, critical minerals, high speed rail. The federal Liberals have a long list of big, expensive projects they say will help Canada realize its economic potential. But should pension funds and their very, very deep pockets play a role in making them happen? Matthew Mendelson is the CEO of Social Capital Partners, and Keith Ambachtsheer is the co-founder of KPA Advisory Services and director emeritus of the International Centre for Pension Management at the University of Toronto. Matthew, great to have you in studio, Keith. Great to have you on the line from Fonthill, Ontario. Niagara. I want to start things off with a breakdown of assets owned by Canadian Trusteed pension funds. Almost $2.5 trillion worth held around the world. And as you can see, domestic assets are at almost $1 trillion. While the combination of foreign and unknown nationality assets are a little more than a trillion. Keith, I'm going to start with you. What does this chart tell you about the interest of Canadian pension funds in investing in home here in Canada?

Keith Ambachtsheer: One word that comes to mind is diversification. This the people that manage this money have a fiduciary obligation to think about risk and to manage both risk and return. And so when you get to the kind of sizes that we're looking at here, obviously you can't all invest in one country. You have to seek diversification around the world. And so the discussion becomes, you know, either optimal amounts as to what you invest at home versus what you invest outside the country. And that's part of a live discussion that's ongoing. But I think the key principle here is that you can't stick all this money in one country. It has to be invested globally around the world, and our funds have gotten very good at doing that, especially at the big end where they actually have offices around the world to do this, investing globally on behalf of Canadian pensioners.

Matthew Mendelson: Well, it's a big question. Keith is right. I agree with everything Keith said. It's really important that our pension funds are diversified, that they invest across asset classes, that they invest across geographies. They are very sophisticated, well respected. But I would add that at this moment, given what has happened over the last two years, we all recognize that the world has changed. The nature of risk has changed, our largest trading partner has clearly changed, and there's a lot more risk in investing in the United States. And the United States is also seeking to do us harm at the moment. So we have seen from our governments a deep belief that it is important that governments rethink geopolitical strategy, how we invest, how we build the economy. As you know, the Canadian government is out there trying to attract $500 billion of investment. So I think at this point in our history it's really important that all institutional investors pension funds but others as well big family offices charitable foundations endowments all of us think about whether there are additional things we need to be thinking about other than just market adjusted returns. And I'm not saying those aren't important. Risk adjusted market returns are very important, but there are some other things to be considering as well. When you look at the Canadian landscape with a lot of these funds, be a little nervous to change course, even if the surrounding environment is changing. If it's working, why change it?

Matthew Mendelson: Well, they're certainly they certainly would be nervous. And that's an important piece to remember about how they're Organized, how they work, how they incentivise their fund managers, how they Organize themselves around their committees. So they would, over the last 20 years have added climate risk committees. Right. And so they're thinking about climate risk in ways that they didn't 20 or 30 years ago. Should they be thinking about sovereignty in ways that they weren't 20 or 30 years ago? Should they be thinking about the long term value and investments that they are building here in Canada in ways that they didn't 20 or 30 years ago? You can see that the federal government is looking at a whole bunch of different things, allowing pension funds to own more than 30% of a company, invest more in our infrastructure. And the federal government is actually incenting by putting in some money, trying to crowd in investment in mid-sized Canadian businesses, in venture capital. So there are lots of ways that the Canadian government and others can incent different kinds of investments.

投资加拿大基础设施：挑战与机遇

主持人: All right. Let's take a broader look outside of this province as well. I want to look over to our neighbours to the east in Quebec. Keith, the CAS has a dual mandate to also invest in Quebec itself. What has been Cass's experience with investing in Quebec's infrastructure, particularly?

Keith Ambachtsheer: Let me just back up a little bit into the previous question. A lot of the way things are done depends on the governance and Organization design of these plans. So dynamically over time, you know, they have to be Organized so that there's a a board that oversees to make sure that, you know, the Organization has the right talents, but then on a dynamic basis, you know, the kind of things you're discussing and that Matthew's discussing. You know, that's part of an ongoing discussion. It's called the total portfolio approach, where the kind of things that come along with the passage of time, you know, get integrated into potentially adjusting the asset, mix the portfolio over over time. So a good example of that is La casa de one of the largest institutional investors in Canada. Actually, they were in the global mail this morning with just they've just made a $1 billion commitment in Australia to a particular power plan that that they're going to be funding. So it's a classic example of, you know, the around the world aspect of how these funds are managed through time and how they make decisions over time. It has to be done in a risk reward sense, but you also have to, especially when you go into private markets, rather than just buying bonds and stocks where you really need to have some good infrastructure, intelligence and experience inside that Organization to make those kinds of decisions. So they're very much integrated into the economies and they know what's going on. And that's part of their dynamic, ongoing decision process.

主持人: Keith, I'll stick with you. But what infrastructure do other Canadian pension funds currently own here in Canada give us a sense of the picture here?

Keith Ambachtsheer: Well, the an obvious one that you you may be driving on is the 407 owned by CPP Investment Board. Due to a significant degree. There are other examples, but one of the interesting things that we've learned over time is that it's more difficult in Canada currently to make those kinds of investments than it is in other countries. An example, for example, is Heathrow. Heathrow is owned by pension funds around the world. In London, Pearson not so much because it's very difficult for pension funds to sort of wrap their heads around how they would invest in Pearson. It can't be done right now. So there's sort of a whole interesting discussion about how welcome, you know, this kind of capital is how easy it is to make these kinds of investments. And that's an area where I think Canada still needs to do some work in terms of, you know, creating the environment that welcomes capital from around the world to make infrastructure investments in Canada, we should be doing more than what we're currently doing.

主持人: Matthew, I'll get you on there. Should we be doing more? You know, we're talking I'm mentioning airports. Well, we've got potential expansions here at Billy Bishop, got expansions happening at Pearson. Talk to me a little bit about the challenges there in getting the infrastructure.

Matthew Mendelson: So I won't speak particularly about that project. I'm not an expert on that project, but an important consideration that I think that the Canadian government should be thinking about is how we mobilise our institutional investors. Yes. To invest in infrastructure, yes. To expand these kinds of big projects, but also how to invest to build new things as well. The federal government right now is seeking investors from around the world to big to build new resource projects, new energy projects, new infrastructure projects. So I think it's really important that we use our huge resources to build new things as well. And from my perspective. Our our pension funds are amongst the most trusted, well-resourced, respected investors globally. And it strikes me that we should be doing more with them because we are at a moment where the returns are important. There's no doubt returns are important, but we see with the Quebec pension plan, they also have an economic development mandate. I'm not saying our pension fund should have a dual mandate necessarily, but it is certainly possible to get really high returns while also thinking about the long term economic development that is taking place. And I think most Canadians and many pension fund leaders will say the only thing Canadians care about is the returns. And as long as the returns are strong, everyone's happy. I just don't think that's true anymore. I just don't think that if the Canadian pension funds can get equally high returns, but investing in Canada, in our growth companies, in our resource projects, in our energy transition, or even in newer asset classes like affordable housing or community infrastructure, I just don't think Canadians, all Canadians, will say the only thing that matters is getting the highest returns. I think they care about the long term sustainability and growth and sovereignty of the country. And the pension funds do as well. Like they they are trying to think this through. We are at a key moment here of rupture and change, I believe, and I think we have to have this conversation more directly.

主持人: Keith, let me get you in on there. Do you think pension plan members would be willing to sacrifice some return if they knew their contributions would be spent to strengthen the economy at home?

Keith Ambachtsheer: It's a really tough question to put to someone who relies on a pension to say, oh yeah, I'll give up some of my pension. I think the the interesting question is, is that really necessary? You know, do we really need to go in that direction? I don't think we do. Actually, a couple of things. There's an interesting concept in all this called, you know, the home bias pension plans around the world have a natural home bias to invest more in their own country than in other countries on a proportionate basis. So that's their Y information. You have more information at home, you know, more people at home who to trust, who not to trust. So there's a natural home bias that's already, you know, in the cards. Should it be more than it currently is? My sense is that if that happens, it should happen for the right reasons not to give up returns, but to facilitate and get create the opportunities to make those investments. And part of that is, relates to the kind of people that are part of these investment organizations. And I think the staffing there is tremendously important as to the kind of people that are there with, you know, with the assets and with the potential opportunity to make those investments. We want them to be to have an entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial mindset. And again, as we were saying earlier, we're lucky in Canada to actually have these, especially the Maple eight, you know, the really big organizations that FAO CPP investments that have those kinds of people on staff. So we're actually quite well positioned to take advantage of, you know, home based opportunities when they exist.

Matthew Mendelson: And I would just say that I believe that it is very possible for large pension funds and other institutional investors to think about their governance and their committee structure and how they are building funds and what kinds of investment opportunities they are looking for and achieve just as high returns by investing more domestically. And I'm certainly not saying they shouldn't be investing globally. But putting aside the question that I believe that the evidence is very strong, that you can be looking domestically and organizing yourself for particular kinds of opportunities, that may require a bit more work to find, even though I believe that you can find just as high returns investing domestically, I don't. I genuinely believe for most Canadians, if they are investing in Palantir or Elon Musk or crypto, there are a whole bunch of things in the private prison system. If you actually engage with Canadians about whether they would accept half a percent, because these are not big differences, it's not like you'd be getting 12% versus 0%. You don't have to invest in Palantir. You don't have to invest in Elon Musk. You don't have to invest in the building of private prisons for Ice and data collection. You don't have to invest in those things. Doesn't mean you can't find other investments and find other returns. So I think that at this time, I would also add, you don't want to be investing in companies that, you know, medium term, long term are going to be hurting the country, are going to be hurting, your sovereignty are going to be extracting wealth from Canada and preventing smaller Canadian businesses from growing and thriving and not getting access to the capital and not becoming more productive. So I think you can get very high returns investing in Canada. But I also think that we have to think about questions like sovereignty and our long term economic growth much more than we have.

主持人: All right. I want to talk a little bit about the Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund. Not a lot of details yet. So far. This was announced in the Ontario's budget earlier this year. $4 billion. Keith, how should it work? You know, there's still some details out there that we need to know, but how should it work in order to attract private capital, such as pension fund investments?

Keith Ambachtsheer: Well, if you read the Globe and Mail, I actually had an op ed piece to that on that topic just a couple of days ago. My my concern with the what I, what I understand to be the current intent is that the Ontario government made it very clear that this new capital fund needs to be managed by a private sector manager. And so, you know, my question was in my op ed piece, why we have such a great reputation and we have this great ability to get these assets managed at a much lower cost than typically what's being charged in the commercial private equity space. Like, rather than 3 or 4% of assets, it's 0.4% of assets that can, you know, through which it could be done through these public funds.

Matthew Mendelson: I agree that we have extraordinarily well respected, competent, large public sector pension managers. The federal government with the Canada Growth Fund right now. And this is getting a bit into the weeds. But, you know, they have a public pension manager who is investing those funds, partnering with government. So we are at a time where, you know, it's not just let the market decide, let capital decide. All around the world, governments and private sector coming together to build projects. Co-invest, I mean, that's been one of the things that Canada has been focussed on the last 18 months. How do we make it less risky for pension funds or others to invest in big things that are going to build our sovereignty, that are going to build housing, that are going to build infrastructure here in Canada. And we are at a moment where, you know, a lot of our public sector fund managers can be managing other initiatives and other pools of capital and working with government to build our sovereignty, strengthen our food system, all the kinds of things that we're talking about, rather than just passively look around the world for the best possible return on our dollar.

主持人: Gentlemen, we are going to have to leave it there. Matthew. Keith, thank you so much. A wealth of knowledge at the table here. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Okay. Given everything that's been happening south of the border and around the world, quote unquote, Buy Canadian policies have taken off, but not all of them deliver what they promise. Kaylee Thiessen is chief economist with the Canadian Shield Institute for Public Policy, and she joins me in studio. How are you doing?

Kaylee Thiessen: I'm doing great today. How are you?

主持人: I'm doing well. All right. The institute came up with something called the Sovereignty Score. Help us understand what is it and what's the methodology behind it.

Kaylee Thiessen: Yeah. Okay. So the sovereignty score is you know exactly what it says it is. In a nutshell, we're looking at government policy decisions based on whether or not it's actually delivering the sovereignty that our governments say they're trying to sort of advance at this particular moment. Sovereignty is not simple. When we first started out, we thought, oh yeah, this is so easy. Something is either sovereign, it's not or it's not. You either have control or you don't. But in fact, there's, you know, a constellation of factors that come with sovereignty. Our score is divided into two categories. There's sovereignty, which is about governance and control. And then there's economic prosperity, which is about delivering value add to Canada's economy, basically. And we look at these ten factors underneath these two categories and then score every policy for whether or not it's actually delivering. We think about things like jobs. So jobs is a really important piece of sovereignty. Absolutely an important piece. And it's an important piece of value add. But we found so far that it's basically one of the only things that governments focus on. And we should be focusing on more than just jobs, though jobs is incredibly important. So then we move on to talking about skills, whether or not we're utilising the skills that Canadians are developing or improving the skills of Canadians as we're creating more jobs. Actually thinking about things like IP ownership and delivering profit to and building Canadian companies instead of delivering sort of government investment to foreign firms that then sort of leak that value to other countries and other economies, instead of building even more strength and prosperity in Canada. That's the economic prosperity side. We also think about things like diversifying the supply chain and capturing the value chain. Okay. Reducing reliance on foreign firms and another one on the on the shield score. I haven't listed them all, but another one is making sure we're not sort of entrenching monopolies, are we making sure we're building many companies instead of just one that could eventually have enough power to influence government in a way that makes us not sovereign much as we've seen the tech industry in the United States.

主持人: And when we talk about the methodology, we're talking about a score out of ten. Is it a checklist? If they've crossed off all of those, sort of some of the points that you mentioned?

Kaylee Thiessen: Yeah, absolutely. So it's just a yes or no. We had talked about doing half points, and then we realised that every single one would get a half point all the time because there's like, oh, we did it. We got it a little bit of the way there. You know, two out of ten are like, you know, 10 or 20% out of the full 100. So just making sure we're going yes or no with every point is, is what we decided on in the end.

政策评估：“主权评分”与实际成效

主持人: All right. Your institute assessed some sovereignty related policies that are encouraging growth in domestic companies. We'll start off with the defence industrial policy. This came out just this year in February 2026. Got eight out of ten. Yeah. What is it doing. Well.

Kaylee Thiessen: So the government has the federal government has the intention of growing Canadian companies, creating jobs in Canada, increasing skills of Canadians, and utilising the skills that many of us have developed over time, but maybe aren't able to utilise in the current labour market. And so making sure that those things go are moving forward also has a focus on IP retention, and building Canadian companies is another piece of the puzzle. It's certainly going to increase security, the security of Canada, as well as avoiding entrenching monopolies, because the intention is to look more at smaller Canadian companies and start to grow them, instead of just delivering all of the money to American firms and the American military industrial complex. Unfortunately, what we've seen so far with the investments that have gone into the defence industrial strategy, is that they're not necessarily living up to their potential. So we analyzed a recent a recent announcement, which was money into creating ammunition, building ammunition in Canada. And that move underneath the Defence Industrial strategy only got a three out of ten. So the intention of the policy got an eight out of ten. And then the execution is getting a three because it did not increase did not decrease our reliance on foreign firms. There's $1 billion investment into an American company that will be building the shells and and creating the inputs into the ammunition is one example of what got missed.

主持人: Okay, let's look at another one that did quite well, the Online Streaming Act. This was introduced in late 2023 under the Trudeau government. Nine out of ten. This is where we're talking about Netflix, YouTube here. What's working with that policy?

Kaylee Thiessen: Yeah. So the intention again of the policy is to make sure that the industrial activity that is occurring is occurring to produce all of the things that we stream is actually occurring in Canada. And so there's very, very in-depth and specific policies about how many jobs need to be created, what the skills are that are required. So it's, it's making sure that jobs across the whole skill level of the industry are created in, in Canada. And that is that activity is done here. In addition, we also see that there are requirements for IP to be retained in Canada by the writers. It's not something that just immediately Netflix, you know, owns the rights to your ideas anymore. But in fact, some of that stays in Canada. And that means that then as you know, there's spin offs and other things that also is going to be based in Canada. That's some of some of why the policy got such a high score.

主持人: Let's talk about the Buy Canadian policy. This was a federal policy given six out of ten. Some work to be done there. What's the weakness of this plan?

Kaylee Thiessen: Yeah, the weakness there is, first of all, the Buy Canadian policy delivers. It assumes you're a Canadian company. As long as you have a Canadian address.

主持人: That's all you need. An address?

Kaylee Thiessen: Yeah. And there are so many foreign subsidiaries that have a Canadian address, but actually are owned and controlled by an American company. And so right away we see, you know, there's this idea that, oh, yeah, we're delivering all of this value to Canadian companies, but in fact, they are American companies. So that's one of the big weaknesses.

主持人: All right. In the budget, the 2026 Ontario budget, the province announced an initiative called the Protect Ontario Account Investment Fund. The Ford government says it will invest $4 billion into it. How should this plan work so that it can have its maximum effect? When we talk about a, you know, capital investment, but also from a sovereignty score, do well.

Kaylee Thiessen: Yeah. So when we heard about this, this fund, we thought right away like, oh, this would be great for our sovereignty score. And then we read the budget more deeply and found that there aren't details yet. So we don't know how it's going to operate. We do know that the Protect Ontario account, there's sort of two pieces under that already, and they define an Ontario or Canadian company as a company that has 250 employees or more and has a head office or main office in Canada or in Ontario. And that means that as long as you have that foreign subsidiary with a main office in Canada, they can they can qualify to get money under this fund. We are saying that that isn't good enough. We should actually be focusing all of that money. It's billions of dollars focusing that money on growing Canadian companies that then can expand their reach in Canada, create jobs, higher skills, utilise the skills capacity of Canadians, reduce reliance on foreign firms, diversify the supply chain, focus on the supply chain in Canada, that would do a lot to actually increase the score that they could get, but we couldn't score it because we don't have any details yet.

主持人: Fair enough. All right. Well, we'll have to wait until we get more details and we'll look forward to your score. Kayla. We're going to have to leave it there. But thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Kaylee Thiessen: Thank you. It's been great.

主持人: I'm Jeyan. Thanks for watching The Rundown. We'd love to know what you think. So send us your suggestions and feedback at TVO.org\rundownfeedback or as always, you can leave us a comment on YouTube. Until then, I will see you tomorrow.