Pension giants eye ports, rail, and airports as Ottawa warms to asset recycling
CUSMA is forcing Canada’s pensions and Ottawa to finally want the same thing: more large, investable projects at home.
The Financial Post reported Institutional investors and the federal government are moving closer together on big-ticket infrastructure, critical minerals and housing as both sides treat domestic investment as a way to manage rising trade and geopolitical risk ahead of the 2026 Canada‑US-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) talks.
“The government (is) actually getting more synchronized with what private investors are looking for,” said Charles Emond, chief executive of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), which manages $496bn. “You can sense a momentum. That is a big difference from before.”
He tied that shift to Ottawa’s push to “catalyze” hundreds of billions in private capital and to the pressure that CUSMA renegotiation creates for Canada to strengthen its own economic base.
According to Financial Post, CDPQ is already backing a “nation‑building” expansion of Montreal’s port, one of five projects the Mark Carney government fast‑tracked in September.
Its infrastructure arm also belongs to the consortium co‑developing the high‑speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City with the federal government.
“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,” Emond said.
He said CDPQ has been in active discussions with Ottawa about projects in or running through Quebec in critical minerals, housing and transportation.
For nearly a decade, Ottawa tried and largely failed to steer pension money into domestic “nation‑building” projects.
Since at least 2016, the federal government has pressed Canada’s global pensions to invest more at home, ramping up the pressure toward the end of Justin Trudeau’s nine‑year tenure.
The problem was fit.
The Financial Post said many projects were too small or not scalable enough to justify effort.
Others did not meet required risk‑return profiles or fund mandates, making it hard to reconcile political priorities with fiduciary duty.
Recent US tariffs and economic threats in 2025 have pushed some pension executives to look harder at domestic assets.
Emond said the relationship has shifted from defensive to constructive.
“They are having an open dialogue with investors like us as to what is needed to attract capital,” said Emond, whose fund combines a return mandate with a requirement to support Quebec’s economy.
Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ottawa has laid out a clearer roadmap: five priority areas including energy transportation and export, critical minerals development and port expansion, plus a centralized Major Projects Office.
According to Financial Post, Emond said that framework finally looks like something large, long‑term investors can work with.
He pointed to the £38bn nuclear project in the United Kingdom, in which CDPQ has committed $3.2bn, as the kind of scale that becomes possible when governments and pensions align on energy security and infrastructure.
Emond said Ottawa is now more willing to look at models that have already worked for Canadian funds abroad, especially Australia’s “asset recycling” program.
In that program, the Australian government raised more than A$23bn by selling or leasing mature, cash‑generating infrastructure assets to pension funds, then earmarked part of the proceeds for new projects that would not produce returns for years.
CDPQ and Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) bought into assets from electricity transmission to ports.
Emond said there is “a way to sell us stabilized assets that will provide capital” so that the government can “get new capital and can re-inject it in the other project that they wish to launch,” even if those projects are more difficult for pension funds to invest in.
He added, “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.”
He stressed there is no single template for combining public and private capital to reduce Canada’s reliance on the United States, but he pointed to work by economists at Bank of Nova Scotia to show the potential scale.
Rebekah Young, vice‑president and economist at Bank of Nova Scotia, estimated that opening as little as 5 percent of all government assets to private investors could generate $25bn to $50bn to redeploy into riskier, more transformational projects.
She wrote that “a more ambitious push could exceed $100bn” and argued that recycling mature assets could support fiscal resilience and long‑term growth without heavy new borrowing.
By her estimate, about half of Canada’s $470bn in government‑owned infrastructure — roads, rail, bridges, ports, airports, utilities and pipelines — would suit pension ownership.
The Financial Post reports that she noted that Canadian funds’ domestic infrastructure holdings trail peers in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia largely because governments here have done far less monetization.
Young’s analysis includes the federal government’s interests in Canada’s largest airports.
Ottawa leases 23 airports, including Toronto Pearson International Airport, to not‑for‑profit authorities that have operated them since the early 1990s.
November’s budget said the government will now consider airport privatization options, reviving an idea last studied — and shelved — nearly a decade ago.
Transport Canada also owns and operates smaller airports in BC, Manitoba, Quebec and Newfoundland.
Airports are a familiar asset class for Canadian pensions. CDPQ joined the consortium that bought London’s 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 Quebec or other Canadian airports. “But it is up to the federal government to identify its options.”
The Financial Post said that Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP) have also built out airport portfolios and internal teams to manage them.
PSP chief executive Deb Orida said earlier this year that the fund is looking for more ways to invest at home and would welcome chances to apply its international infrastructure expertise to Canadian assets, including airports and data centres.
A PSP spokesperson said the fund, which has $68.7bn invested in Canada, is “on the lookout for good opportunities to leverage our ‘home ice advantage’ and explore new investment opportunities” and is “excited to continue to leverage our global expertise here, in Canada.”
Deal pipelines and frameworks still have to translate into signed transactions.
Emond declined to call a clear liftoff in the next 12 months, but he said the 2026 CUSMA negotiations will keep pressure on both Ottawa and pensions to stay aligned after a decade of missteps.
“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.”
