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The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board eked out a gain of 0.2 per cent in a fiscal second quarter that was tough for investors, adding $1-billion to the fund’s assets in spite of broad weakness in public and private equities as well as fixed income markets. CPPIB’s investment returns outperformed The S&P Global LargeMidCap index, a measure of stocks CPPIB uses as 85 per cent of its benchmark reference portfolio, which fell 1.46 per cent in the quarter in Canadian-dollar terms. But CPPIB narrowly trailed the performance of Canadian defined-benefit pension plans in the quarter, in which assets were up 0.5 per cent, according to Royal Bank of Canada’s RBC I&TS All Plan Universe. In the first nine months of the year, those pension plans have lost 13.7 per cent. Gains in U.S. dollar-denominated investments, which were boosted by foreign exchange rates, and positive returns from energy and infrastructure investments helped keep returns positive after CPPIB lost $23-billion in the...

Attabotics CEO Scott Gravelle, pictured in 2020, says the warehouse robotics company is looking to introduce a recurring revenue model where customers pay as they use the technology, in order to provide a stream of cash that is steadier than one-time installation contracts. Jeff McIntosh/Tausi Insider Export Development Canada has led a US$72-million investment in Calgary warehouse robotics startup Attabotics Inc., part of a recent strategy by the Crown corporation to boost support for globally-minded medium-sized companies. The federal government’s export financing arm is leading the investment, while Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which led a US$50-million of convertible debt financing to Attabotics in 2020, has converted its stake into equity and invested another US$11-million as part of this round. It’s the first deal involving Teachers’ venture growth unit since its $95-million investment in cryptocurrency exchange operator FTX vaporized last week. Other Attabotics investors in...

Brookfield Asset Management Inc.’s renewables affiliate is committing to invest up to US$700-million in a newly formed U.S. recycling business, targeting recycled materials as part of the push to cut global carbon emissions. Brookfield Renewable Partners LP has invested an initial US$200-million for a minority stake in Circular Services, a new company that is majority owned and managed by New York-based investment firm Closed Loop Partners. Brookfield Renewable is also committing to invest another US$500-million to help Circular Services grow. The investment is being made through the US$15-billion Brookfield Global Transition Fund, which is co-led by vice chair and former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Brookfield Renewable CEO Connor Teskey. It is Brookfield’s first fund focused on investments intended to help speed the transition to a net-zero economy. Circular Services owns and operates a dozen municipal recycling facilities in the United States. And it has large municipa...

Photo : DavideAngelini ( Shutterstock ) The promise of early retirement is so seductive, any YouTuber claiming they achieved it is going to draw me in. If you’re at all interested in the prospect of early retirement, we highly recommend you first read up on the basics of FIRE (financial independence, retire early). In short: The FIRE movement boils down to taking advantage of the value of compound interest from investing early in your 20s. Naturally, the movement has some critics, largely claiming that FIRE promotes unrealistic projections of wealth for anyone who doesn’t already have some substantial wealth in the first place. To be frank, after watching all these early retirement videos, I would label myself a critic of FIRE. The ability to put significant distance between your income and your spending is too big a privilege to be truly relatable. I’d wager that more Americans are too worried about retiring ever to even imagine retiring early.   Still, I went down this perso...

B.C.-based Carbon Engineering Ltd. has secured multimillion-dollar investments from Air Canada AC-T and aircraft manufacturer Airbus SE to scale up and improve its technology for extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, the latest in a series of funding announcements from big-name backers. Carbon Engineering said the funding will go to research and development at its innovation centre in Squamish, B.C. The work there is aimed at improving the efficiency and reducing costs of the direct-air capture technology, one of a number of methods being used around the world to remove greenhouse gas emissions in the fight against climate change. “By providing the funding, they’re allowing us to go faster. We have an ambitious program and it requires lots of labour and equipment,” Daniel Friedmann, chief executive officer of Carbon Engineering, said in an interview. “The more funding we have to move things forward, the more things we can do in parallel.” Air Canada contributed $6.75-million in an equi...

Executives at companies across 20 major economies see the Ukraine conflict speeding up the pace of the transition to cleaner energy, rather than slowing it down, a survey by Britain-based law firm Ashurst found. The findings counter fears that bans on Russian natural gas following its invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a special operation, are driving up demand for coal for heat and power generation and hampering investment in wind and solar power. “The need to ensure greater energy security made evident by the crisis is likely to lead to a quicker energy transition, not a slowdown,” Ashurst said in a report released on Wednesday. More than 75 per cent of 1,999 senior executives surveyed across Group of 20 (G20) countries expected the Ukraine conflict would speed up energy transition in their country, while 12 per cent predicted it would slow transition, Ashurst said. Companies and banks were driving investment in renewable power, particularly in such countries as Brazil, India ...

An SSE vehicle is parked outside the Pitlochry Dam hydro electric power station in Pitlochry, Scotland. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is paying £1.47-billion ($2.4-billion) for a 25-per-cent stake in SSEN Transmission. RUSSELL CHEYNE/Reuters Two major Canadian investments announced Friday have refocused attention on an often overlooked sector seen as crucial for the low-carbon energy transition: distribution. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan said Friday it will pay £1.47-billion ($2.4-billion) for a 25-per-cent stake in SSEN Transmission, a division of Scotland-based SSE PLC, which delivers hydroelectric power from northern Scotland to the rest of Britain. The deal represents the pension plan’s largest-ever power distribution investment. Separately on Friday, the Canada Infrastructure Bank and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce CM-T announced they have committed $135-million each in funding for Markham District Energy, which provides centralized heating and cooling for 230 bui...

Alberta's oil-dominated economy is used to boom-and-bust cycles, but as global demand for oil is once again rising higher energy revenues are not translating into a sustained economic boom for the province. Craig Glover/cglover@craigglover.com Glen Hodgson is a senior fellow at the C.D. Howe Institute. Charles St-Arnaud is chief economist at Alberta Central. Alberta has earned a reputation over many decades for being a boom-bust economy. Strong oil demand and high prices have created boom times for jobs, incomes, investment and government revenues, while weak demand and falling prices have meant a slowdown or even recession on occasion. But now, global demand for oil is again rising and prices are high, yet more oil-production revenue is not translating into a sustained economic boom for Alberta. The province’s economy grew by 4.8 per cent in real terms (with inflation removed) in 2021. A budget surplus has financed or paid for Premier Danielle Smith’s latest inflation-relief han...

Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail If houses are investments, then they’re subject to the harsh math of investing losses. However much an asset falls in price, it has to rise by a larger percentage just to get back to the starting point. The national average resale home price peaked at $816,720 in February and has since fallen a bit more than 21 per cent to $644,463 in October. To get back to the peak, we need the average price to rise by almost 27 per cent. Figure on it taking between four and five years to do that, if prices bounce back enough to revive the toxic idea that houses are investments. Treating houses as investments means the death of affordability. The longer prices decline or flatline, the more opportunity there will be for home ownership to remain a viable middle-class goal. Still, the investment mentality is a big reason why our housing market overheated. Attention must be paid. What houses have going for them as investments is a decades-long history of price appreciation t...

Pfizer Inc PFE-N is investing more than $2.5 billion at its drug making plants in Belgium and Ireland, gearing up to launch new products it hopes can replace lost revenue as patents expire and COVID-19 vaccine sales decline. The drugmaker said on Friday it plans to spend more than 1.2 billion euros ($1.26 billion) to expand its Puurs, Belgium, manufacturing site, matching the investment at its Dublin, Ireland, plant announced on Thursday. In Belgium, some projects related to the investment announced on Friday are already underway, with others planned to begin early next year, Pfizer said in a press release. At the plant in Ireland, expansion is expected to begin in 2024 and to be completed in 2027, the company said. The Puurs site has played a key role in the production of COVID-19 vaccine shots Pfizer developed with its German partner BioNTech using messenger RNA (mRNA) technology. Output started there in late 2020 when Europe and the United States began rolling out shots to tackle ...

Children's backpacks and shoes at a CEFA (Core Education and Fine Arts) Early Learning daycare franchise, in Langley, B.C., on May 29, 2018. DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press At a time of rising interest rates and rampant inflation, the move toward $10-a-day child care is a rare bit of financial good news for new and aspiring Canadian parents. But, as Ottawa has rolled out the plan, it’s become clear that many families will likely end up paying far more than 10 bucks per day. As it negotiated separate deals with the provinces and territories, the federal government always intended $10 to be the average – not the maximum. We should all work to make $10 per day into more than just a guideline. Childcare is a huge expense for young families each month, often amounting to a second rent- or mortgage-sized payment. Young people must pay for this cost on top of housing prices that are frighteningly higher than when baby boomers started their families. Today’s home prices more often require...

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem in Ottawa on Jan. 26. Blair Gable/Tausi Insider John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and managing director of Seaford Macro. Central bankers must be feeling punch-drunk. For years, they strode like superheroes. We praised their genius, bestowed them with titles such as “maestro” – as one journalist labelled Alan Greenspan in a now-infamous encomium – and revelled in the New Jerusalem to which they’d delivered us: a Promised Land of low inflation and endless credit, where all we had to do to get rich was buy a house and watch it grow. But then, almost overnight, the story changed. Central bankers turned into villains – architects of soaring inflation, punishing mortgage costs, plunging house values and the inevitable advance toward recession. Unifor chief Lana Payne, leader of Canada’s largest private-sector union, recently charged that, by raising interest rates, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem “has basically de...

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tours a rental housing development in Vancouver on Feb. 11, 2019. JONATHAN HAYWARD/The Canadian Press Mark Kenney is the president and chief executive of Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust (CAPREIT). The solution to the housing crisis is simple: We need more homes, of all kinds. At Canadian Apartment Properties Real Estate Investment Trust (CAPREIT), we are part of that solution. We provide rental homes for Canadians. However, we have a simple problem. In the 2021 mandate letters, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked the ministers of housing and finance “to expand Canada’s housing supply” and “review and consider possible reforms to the tax treatment of REITs.” These priorities are in conflict. A REIT, like us, is essentially a form of mutual fund. Investors buy into REITs, and the resulting funds are used to build rental homes. Like shares in a publicly traded company, investors’ stakes in REITs earn dividends and go up and down w...

Even in nickel, where Canada was a one-time global leader, it holds just 2.1 per cent of reserves, while Indonesia and Australia hold 22 per cent each. Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters Canada is unlikely to benefit much from the explosion in global demand for critical minerals because of a dearth of reserves, according to two Calgary academics, who also argue in favour of cutting red tape to make domestic miners more competitive. “Most of North America’s critical transition minerals will have to come from reserves in South America, Africa and the Caribbean as well as Australia and China,” Philip Bazel, research associate at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, and Jack Mintz, a president’s fellow there, wrote in a report released on Tuesday. “Canada’s participation in the energy transition mining market may hinge on the shape of its regulatory and taxation framework.” Citing worldwide critical minerals reserves data from the U.S. Geological Survey, the authors point out that Canad...

Canada’s biggest pension fund, CPP Investments, has ended its effort to study investment opportunities in the volatile crypto market, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters. The reasons behind CPPI’s abandonment of crypto research were not immediately clear. CPPI declined to comment but said it has made no direct investments in crypto. It referred to previous comments on cryptocurrency by its CEO, John Graham, in which he sounded a note of caution. CPPI’s Alpha Generation Lab, which examines emerging investment trends, had formed a three-member team in early 2021 to research crypto currencies and blockchain-related businesses, with a view to taking potential exposure, the people added. But CPPI abandoned the pursuit this year and redeployed the team to other areas, the sources said. CPPI’s move also comes as two of Canada’s largest pension funds have written off their investments after the collapse of crypto exchange FTX and crypto lender Celsius this year. Earlier this yea...