Canada’s vast pension fund is gaining even more financial clout

TWICE A WEEK the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), which manages pensions for 20m of Canada’s citizens, holds meetings to approve or reject investments above C$500m ($375m). Agenda items are plentiful. Since 2017 the board has sanctioned investments in, among other things, toll roads in Mexico and Australia; rental housing in China; shale assets in Ohio; solar and wind assets in India and America; and big chunks of Endeavor, a Beverly Hills talent agency, and Ant Financial, a Chinese financial giant.

The Canada Pension Plan (CPP) is a state-run earnings-related pensions scheme, but its investment board is run as an independent entity. The fund’s portfolio size has more than tripled over the past decade, and is going to become only more gigantic. At the end of last year its portfolio was C$454bn. Investment income, plus an expansion in the scope of the plan this month, which raises contributions in return for higher payouts, means assets may expand at a healthy rate for decades. The CPP receives contributions equivalent to 9.9% of most Canadians’ pay (the province of Quebec has its own system), and that share is set to reach 11.9% by 2023. The fund is a particularly mammoth example of a type of state investor that is wielding increasing influence worldwide.

When the CPP was founded in 1965, it had a familiar defect: a mismatch between the benefits promised and the contributions required. By the mid-1990s money was running out. Russia, France and Argentina all faced protests when they tried to stabilise pension funds by squeezing payouts. America’s national pension plan, Social Security, is expected to run out of money by 2034, and the public-sector pensions managed by many states, notably Illinois and New Jersey, face dire shortfalls.

The CPP, by contrast, was overhauled, with contributions raised and its assets separated from the public pot. The investment board was set up in 1997, with a mandate to focus on returns to the exclusion of public policy and a strict transparency requirement. An exemption from public-sector pay caps enables it to hire people from the private sector. Its chief executive, Mark Machin, left Goldman Sachs in 2012 to run the fund’s operations in Asia, before he was promoted in 2016.

What was once a single office in Toronto is now a head office with branches in Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, New York, São Paulo and Sydney. Five departments oversee 25 investment approaches. These include the usual public markets along with direct investments in property, natural resources and infrastructure as well as niche markets such as royalties tied to technology. Outside “partnerships”—with firms through which it invests—have risen from 62 to 254.

Wall Street denizens reckon that its involvement in private equity, which accounts for a fifth of its overall portfolio, places it in the same league as GIC, the entity that manages Singapore’s foreign-exchange reserves. Both have the capability to assess even the most complex potential investments speedily and respond with large amounts of long-term capital. The CPPIB has 195 seats on the boards of 77 companies. It plans to allocate up to a third of its portfolio to emerging markets eventually. That would make it one of the most important sources of private capital to many of the world’s fast-growing projects.

Its risk-management approach means evaluating securities according to factors including geography, debt and equity characteristics, climate risk and gender balance in employment. In pursuit of long-term returns, it is willing to ride out market volatility. In 2018 it expected to have a loss of at least 12.5% at least once a decade. Its actuaries put the annual return needed over the next 75 years to fulfil its obligations at 3.9% above inflation, which it has achieved so far. In order to assess its track record it uses a market benchmark comprised of 85% equity and 15% debt. On average its annual returns have beaten the benchmark over the past ten years, though only modestly.

Inevitably, new risks will emerge. Valuations based on unrealised private-equity positions could be flawed. By taking positions on so many boards the CPPIB is assuming managerial responsibilities for multiple companies; it increasingly resembles a sprawling conglomerate, with the associated organisational challenges. Added to this is the oddity that the entity with a powerful role in private firms itself has state links. Though it is formally separate from Canada’s government, it may still be drawn into geopolitical disputes over, say, tariffs and sanctions. And its size, though beneficial in many respects, makes it harder to trade and manage.

Other similar entities have emerged as big players in recent years. A handful, such as the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System and Quebec’s Caisse de Dépôt et Placement, are also Canadian. Whereas Quebec’s scheme, for instance, dabbles in local economic development, the CPPIB stands out for its professed independence. Its performance matters beyond Canada not just because of its holdings of global assets, but because many other countries, with their ageing populations and poorly funded pension schemes, might hope to draw lessons from it.