Oil refinery near Edmonton operated by Suncor Energy. Photo by POD/Flickr.

Workers in Canada have accumulated almost $3 trillion in savings managed by public pension funds. That’s more than half the market capitalization of the Toronto Stock Exchange, about five times the 2025 federal budget, and nearly equal to Canada’s 2025 GDP.

Our savings, in other words, are a massive pool of money available for investment. That’s good, because we have a lot to invest in: that money could play an outsized role in the roughly $1.5 trillion investment required to reduce Canada’s emissions to zero by 2050. It could contribute to the billions of dollars that need to be spent on climate adaptation, which, according to the Canadian Climate Institute, could yield returns of 1,200-1,400 percent. It could be invested domestically in health care, education, and other infrastructure that is needed to ensure secure and livable futures for Canadian workers.

Our savings, though, are largely invested in private assets in the United States and other countries, and they’re frequently plowed into industries and activities Canadian pensioners want no part in: oil and gas, arms manufacturing, and other polluting and death-dealing activities.

The “Canadian model” for pension fund management, as the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) has bragged, has three key characteristics: staffing pension investment boards with a full suite of financial analysts and experts who make decisions in-house rather than paying rent to asset managers; operating at arm’s length from elected governments and pension beneficiaries; and the freedom to seek “the best investment opportunities around the world.”

Canada’s pension funds are some of the most consistent in this investment approach, and they attribute a large part of their relative success to it.

The CPP, in particular, invests only 12 percent of its fund in Canada, while nearly half is invested in the US. This is no surprise given their investment strategy: US equities typically outperform the rest of the world, particularly over the last decade, thanks in large part to the primacy of American financial might—backed by the world’s reserve currency and the most powerful military in human history.

This strategy has worked well from a fund manager’s perspective, but it’s allowed vast sums of money to leave Canada. To his credit, Prime Minister Mark Carney appears to be changing this: his government is exerting a vast amount of pressure on Canada’s pension fund managers, pushing them to invest in Canadian infrastructure projects. The problem, though, is that Carney is directing their investments toward hand-picked and largely........

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