Spurred by the looming

trade

renegotiation with the

United States

, institutional investors and the Canadian government are finally on the same page and ready to push ahead with multi-billion-dollar projects in priority areas such as

infrastructure

,

critical minerals

and

housing

, says Charles Emond, chief executive of one of the country’s biggest

pension funds

.

“The government (is) actually getting more synchronized with what private investors are looking for,” said Emond, who leads the $496-billion

Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec

. “You can sense a momentum.  That is a big difference from before.”

 

Ottawa is pushing to “catalyze” hundreds of billions of dollars in private investment to shore up government spending on projects that can boost the economy and reduce dependence on the U.S., and Emond said the renegotiation of the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement (

CUSMA

) in 2026 is galvanizing both sides to find ways to get such deals done.

The

Quebec

pension is already participating in a nation-building infrastructure project to expand capacity at Montreal’s port — one of five fast-tracked by

Mark Carney

’s government in September. And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the size and scale of what could be on the agenda in the next year or two.

“We’ve got a pretty big pipeline of several projects in the tens of billions (of dollars), whereby we hope to be able to actually keep pushing the dialogue and get something going,” said Emond, whose fund’s infrastructure arm is also part of a consortium co-developing a high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City alongside the federal government.

“We’ve talked to the federal government about a lot of these projects that are in (or run through) Quebec, and there’s interesting things (ahead), whether it’s in critical minerals, housing and transportation.”

As 2025 brought a wave of

U.S. tariffs

and other economic threats that reverberated in countries around the world, some Canadian pension executives were sufficiently spooked by the rising global risks to begin speaking openly about wanting to participate in domestic projects.

Emond said the roadmap since provided by Carney — which includes five priority areas including energy transportation and export, critical minerals development and port expansion

,

alongside a centralized Major Projects Office — puts a solid framework in place. That could eventually see deals of the size and scale of a £38 billion nuclear project in the United Kingdom, driven by a need for energy security there, that the Caisse is backing with a $3.2-billion investment, he said.

The palpable shift comes after a decade of Ottawa’s largely failed attempts to entice private funds to back pet projects and, more recently, pensions pushing back against any government pressure to devote a greater share of their investment dollars and expertise to Canada.

The federal government has been pushing Canada‘s globe-trotting pensions to invest more in Canada since at least 2016, with pressure amped up again in the waning years of

Justin Trudeau

’s nine-year stint as prime minister. For the most part, however, there was a mismatch between what the government wanted to promote and build and what pensions were willing to fund.

Some of the projects put on offer weren’t large or scalable enough to justify the management time, while others lacked the appropriate risk and return formulas to fulfill fund mandates and meet obligations to pensioners.

But there are significant signs things are different this time. Instead of dreading a threat of quotas, pension funds are now bringing their ideas to the government.

“They are having an open dialogue with investors like us as to what is needed to attract capital,” said Emond, whose fund is unique in Canada with a dual mandate that pairs the objective of investment returns with the pursuit of projects to boost Quebec’s economy.

There is also a new willingness in Ottawa to discuss adopting models that have been successful abroad, he said, such as Australia’s “asset recycling” program from the late 2010s.

 

Under the program, the

Australian government raised more than $23 billion AUD to fund new infrastructure projects by selling or leasing assets that were already producing returns to pension funds. Some of the proceeds were earmarked for new projects that might not yield a return for years. Notably, the Caisse de dépôt and another Canadian pension fund, the

Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System

(OMERS), participated in the Australian program, buying stakes in assets from electricity transmission to ports.

“So there’s a way to sell us stabilized assets that will provide capital (while the) government gets new capital and can re-inject it in the other project that they wish to launch in spite of the fact that they may be more difficult to invest in for pension funds,” Emond said. “The reality is, there’s often a way to align interests and meet the objectives of both governments and investors in combining all that, as opposed to taking them separately.”

That doesn’t mean there’s a one-size-fits-all formula to meet the government’s objectives of combining public and private funding to back big projects that boost Canada’s economy and reduce reliance on the United States, he said. But even a modest asset recycling program in Canada with no more than five per cent of all government assets opened up to private investors could generate between $25 billion and $50 billion to be redeployed into riskier assets, according to economists at the Bank of Nova Scotia.

“A more ambitious push could exceed $100 billion,”

Rebekah Young, a Scotiabank vice-president and economist, said in a June report. “And that’s before factoring in reinvestment ripple effects.”

By her estimate, about half of Canada’s government-owned infrastructure

 

— the roads, rail, bridges, ports, airports, utilities, and pipelines totaling $470 billion on public balance sheets — would be a fit for the pensions.

Canadian pension fund holdings of domestic infrastructure are far lower than those of their counterparts in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, as well as Australia, because there has been limited monetization of such assets by all levels of government in the country, she noted.

“A disciplined asset recycling agenda across all levels of government (in Canada) could redeploy capital from mature assets into the riskier and potentially transformational new investments — without an over-reliance on new borrowing,” the economist wrote, adding that this would bolster both fiscal resilience and long-term economic growth.

Many government-owned assets are in provincial and municipal hands, but Young’s analysis includes the federal government’s holdings in Canada’s largest airports. Ottawa leases 23 airports, including Toronto Pearson International Airport, to not-for-profit airport authorities that have operated them since the early 1990s. But November’s budget indicated that the government will now consider options for privatizing airports. The idea was studied but then shelved nearly a decade ago by the previous Liberal government. Transport Canada also owns and operates a number of smaller airports in British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland.

 

Airports are among the global infrastructure investments made by Canadian pension funds over the past couple of decades, including the Caisse de dépôt, which was part of the consortium that bought London’s busy Heathrow Airport in 2006.

“This is a sector where we have deep experience,” a spokesperson for the Caisse said when asked about potential interest in airports in Quebec or elsewhere across the country. “But it is up to the federal government to identify its options.”

The 

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan

and the

Public Sector Pension Investment Board

(PSP) have also been keen investors in airports, even establishing dedicated divisions to manage the investments.

Deb Orida, chief executive of the PSP Investments, said earlier this year that her fund is looking for more ways to invest at home and would welcome an opportunity to parlay international infrastructure expertise into ownership of Canadian assets, including airports and data centres.

“We continue to be on the lookout for good opportunities to leverage our ‘home ice advantage’ and explore new investment opportunities,” a spokesperson for the fund, which has $68.7 billion invested in Canada, said via email. “We are excited to continue to leverage our global expertise here, in Canada.”

Ella Plotkin, leader of the global infrastructure and projects group at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, said she, like Emond, is feeling the momentum to get large public-private projects off the ground in the coming year. Her phone has been ringing more since Carney’s election in April. With a corresponding buzz at conferences and even her 14-year-old son suddenly finding infrastructure “cool,” she said she is feeling optimistic.

“If now is not the moment, I don’t know when it will be,” she said. “I absolutely see this as a moment in time for Canada to grab on to the need that’s there (and) the funding that is looking for good projects.”

Emond stopped short of predicting liftoff in the next 12 months. But he said the CUSMA trade negotiations in 2026 will undoubtedly keep the pressure on the government and pensions to play ball after a decade of misalignment.

“If there’s no renegotiation, or if it’s bumpy along the way, even a delay can certainly bring the economy under its full potential,” he said. “We need to keep thinking about these big projects to fill in the gap.”

  • Caisse’s $3.2-billion investment in a nuclear project is the kind of deal Canada wants — too bad it’s in the U.K.
  • ‘Not theirs for the taking’: Can the Canadian pension model survive a new era of politicization?

• Email: bshecter@nationalpost.com