Photo courtesy Mark Carney/Facebook

Mark Carney recently announced the creation of Canada’s first national sovereign wealth fund. The fund, slated to be called the Canada Strong Fund, will be launched with $25 billion to be collected over the next three years.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are tools designed to pool public wealth and invest it profitably. Perhaps the most prominent example is Norway’s Government Pension Fund, which manages that nation’s surplus oil and gas revenues. In practice, the fund works by investing those revenues almost entirely in global financial markets—equities, bonds, and real estate abroad—rather than at home, with strict rules to prevent domestic investment.

Founded in 1990, Norway’s SWF is now responsible for over $2.7 trillion. The fund brought in $338 billion in 2025 alone and covered almost one quarter of the nation’s annual budget without risking its long-term sustainability.

Where will the money come from?

The world’s largest SWFs are generally financed by surplus profits from the fossil fuel sector or excess foreign exchange reserves. In Canada, the first provincial SWF was established in Alberta in 1976 by Peter Lougheed’s Conservatives using revenues from the oil and gas sector. The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund (AHSTF) was meant to take fossil fuel profits and create a source of long-term revenue for Albertans. This model was the inspiration for the famous Norwegian fund. Unfortunately, Alberta opted not to tax the energy industry at a rate that allowed for significant contributions, and despite a 14-year head start over Norway’s SWF, the AHSTF now sits at a total value of just over $30 billion.

You might think that Carney’s new SWF would take the lessons from this history to heart. Perhaps he is planning to endow his Canada Strong Fund with a tax on the windfall profits the oil and gas industry is set to enjoy thanks to Trump’s misadventures in Iran. Or maybe his efforts at trade diversification are projected to flood Canada’s banks with yen, yuan, and euros that can be invested abroad.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case. The details remain obscure, but unlike every major SWF in the world,........

© Canadian Dimension