February 2019

15Feb

Canada Pension Plan posts 1.1 percent return in latest quarter

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Canada’s biggest public pension fund, on Thursday reported a net return of 1.1 percent on its investments in the third quarter of its fiscal year. The CPPIB, which manages Canada’s national pension fund and invests on behalf of 20 million Canadians, said its net assets totaled C$368.5 billion ($278 billion) at Dec. 31, 2018, compared with C$368.3 billion three months earlier. For the nine months to Dec. 31, the CPPIB posted a...

February 15, 2019
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03Feb

Pensions at Work: Socially Responsible Investment of Union-Based Pension Funds

By Jack Quarter,‎ Isla Carmichael,‎ Sherida Ryan Pension funds have come to play an increasingly important role within the new economy. According to Statistics Canada, in 2006, trusteed pension funds in Canada had $836 billion of assets and represented the savings of 4.6 million Canadian workers. Pensions at Work is a unique collection of papers that uses a labour perspective to deal with the socially responsible investment of pension funds. Featuring leading Canadian and international scholars, it builds on existing scholarship on...

February 3, 2019
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January 2019

23Jan

Canadian pension fund takes stake in Alliant

Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board is investing in Alliant Insurance Services Inc. and the U.S. brokerage’s majority shareholder Stone Point Capital LLC is upping its stake in the firm, Alliant announced Tuesday. Following the transaction, Greenwich, Connecticut-based Stone Point will remain Alliant’s largest institutional shareholder while the company’s management and producers will continue to own “the majority of the firm,” Newport Beach, California-based Alliant said in a statement. Stone Point became Alliant’s largest institutional shareholder in 2015. Alliant...

January 23, 2019
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22Jan

Canada’s vast pension fund is sticking with China even as political tensions mount

Investment strategies involving China are coming under scrutiny amid political and security-related conflicts between Beijing and major Western economies, as well as a predicted growth slowdown for the world's second-largest economy. But Canada's massive pension fund, among the world's top 10 in terms of size, is sticking to plans to expand its holdings there. Mark Machin, president and chief executive of Canada's Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), sees the country's potential to diversify his portfolio as outweighing any shorter-term...

January 22, 2019
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16Jan

Canada: 2019 Brings New Rules For Federally Regulated Employers

In 2018, provincially regulated employers saw significant changes to provincial employment standards legislation such as found in Bill 17 (Alberta), Bill 176 (Quebec). and Bill 148 (Ontario). Not to be outdone, Parliament has introduced a massive piece of omnibus legislation in Bill C-86 (the Budget Implementation Act, 2018, No. 2) which received royal assent last month. Buried within Bill C-86's changes to tax, customs, banking and pension legislation are significant modifications to the Canada Labour Code and the creation...

January 16, 2019
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02Jan

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board begins managing additional CPP contribution amounts affecting millions of future beneficiaries

Starting this week, (CPPIB) will receive and invest additional Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contribution amounts, helping to safeguard increased retirement income for current CPP contributors and future generations. Federal and provincial governments decided in 2016 to expand the CPP to provide enhanced future benefits for workers who contribute, creating a stronger foundation for retirement. As the investment manager of the CPP Fund, CPPIB is responsible for prudently investing the additional contribution amounts arising from the enhancement to the CPP....

January 2, 2019
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December 2018

07Dec

Canadian taxpayers subsidize government pensions to the tune of $22 billion a year

Government employees don’t pay the full cost of their defined-benefit pensions. Taxpayers provide a $22 billion annual subsidy by assuming undisclosed investment risks for which they are not compensated, finds a new study released today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank. “The issue is not whether government employees should have defined-benefit pensions, but rather how much they should pay for these pensions,” said Philip Cross, Fraser Institute senior fellow and co-author of Risk and Reward...

December 7, 2018
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05Dec

Who Wins The Retirement Game?

On the plane to a family Thanksgiving a nice seatmate asked what kind of work I do (as she watched me struggle with a spreadsheet). I brightly told her I am an economics professor working to expand pensions to solve the retirement crises. She looked at me blankly and said, "I'm Canadian, we don't have these problems. That stopped me short. Really? Canada? Has the friendly nation to the north figured it out? Canada has been described, in jest of course,...

December 5, 2018
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04Dec

Canada pension fund investment into US detention firm larger than reported

CPPIB holds $6.1m in investments in Geo Group, a firm that runs US detention facilities under Trump’s immigration crackdown A controversial investment by one of Canada’s biggest pension funds in a company which operates private prisons in the United States is larger than initially thought, recent securities filings have revealed. The Guardian and Documented reported last month that the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) – which manages $366.6bn in pension funds on behalf of some 20 million Canadian retirees –...

December 4, 2018
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October 2018

19Oct

Canada. ‘Some baloney’ in assertion Canada’s pension fund has highest ethical standards

OTTAWA -- "We expect the CPPIB, like other Crown corporations, to live up to the highest standards of ethics and behaviour and that is, in fact, exactly what it is doing." -- Finance Minister Bill Morneau during question period Monday in the House of Commons. The New Democrats challenged Morneau this week to weigh in on new ethical questions surrounding the investment portfolio of the arms-length Canada Pension Plan Investment Board -- which manages hundreds of billions of dollars worth...

October 19, 2018
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