Canada's first sovereign wealth fund

red-iron-pine

laudable goal. I suspect it will end up like most other Canadian procurement projects. also why all the love for Canadian Pacific rail?

Fire-Dragon-DoL

Doesn't that has the problem of over exposing canadians to canada economics from an enormous an investment perspective? I guess it benefits my kids though

WorkerBee28474

If this is run anything like the CPP, it will underperform both the market and their own benchmarks yet lead to executives awarding themselves huge bonuses.

_whiteCaps_

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_Resources_Inv... Hopefully turns out better than BCRIC.

slopinthebag

Usually a sovereign wealth fund is funded by excess profits, like Norway for example. In this case, it's being seeded by $25 billion dollars of debt. Can anyone more financially gifted explain how this is any different from, well, regular government spending and money printing?

hirako2000

If I understand democracies, the private sector get easy access to credit via the creation of debt. You win you win. You win we lose. but also get money invested on behalf of the tax payer. The market economy is brilliant.

somewhereoutth

I believe wealth taxes (really, wealth restitution) should go into sovereign wealth funds - not least as then the public can see how that money is working for them, and so support the continuance and expansion of such taxes.

boringg

One of the biggest challenges is finding investable projects these days. If they put this money in as a hold to time projects well than could be a good future asset for Canada. If it ends up actually being more of a jobs production vehicle for political gain then probably less successful.

dahdum

This is a great way to sidestep the political process to fund popular projects. The political constraints will ensure returns are middling, so unless they subsidize with tax breaks on dividend income I think it would be a poor commercial investment. Whether its perfect or not, it almost has to be better than the current status quo.

incomingpain

A sovereign wealth fund requires surpluses to be run. This is not a wealth fund at all. This is a debt fund. It doesnt even try to hide the debt that's drowning the federal government. We are borrowing money to play the stock market.

pyrolistical

A sovereign wealth fund makes sense if fund with profits from exploiting our natural resources. That is how Norway did it

petermcneeley

This makes sense once you see the list of Canadian companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_C... #1 is Brookfield Corporation. The now prime minister of Canada headed the ESG there. He is also an international central banker.