Brookfield would invest billions of Canadian pension funds’ dollars in housing, physical and digital infrastructure, renewable energy and privatized public assets, it told fund managers in pitch materials obtained by The Logic.

The $50-billion Maple Fund, as Brookfield calls it, would be the “largest-ever private pool of capital dedicated to investing in the Canadian economy,” reads one document, dated August 2024. The fund, which would be administered by Brookfield Asset Management, would inject capital into sectors the firm says would help grow Canadian companies, and boost productivity and employment in the country. 

The materials identified some “opportunistic situations” where the Maple Fund might get involved, such as privatizing Crown lottery corporations. The same goes for certain established large companies that are transforming—or could. The documents don’t name them, but describe them as a “legacy telecommunications business;” a major auto supplier contending with electric and autonomous vehicle transitions and “world-class family-owned financial services conglomerates” facing succession challenges.

Brookfield did not respond to The Logic’s questions about the pitch materials.

As The Logic reported last week, Brookfield would contribute $4 billion to the fund and is seeking $36 billion from Canada’s largest pensions and $10 billion from the federal government. Brookfield’s pitch so far remains just a pitch. Sources told The Logic last week that the pensions had not committed, and that the potential for conflict of interest involving Brookfield’s chair, Mark Carney—who is advising Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as head of a new Liberal task force on economic growth—could prevent the fund from materializing. 

The Liberals have been trying for years to get the country’s big pension funds to invest more in Canada. In last April’s budget, the government called upon former Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz to drum up ideas for how to make it easier for them to do so.

Brookfield’s presentation, which The Logic obtained from two separate sources, outlines hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of investment opportunities in Canada that the fund could back, across asset classes and sectors. Many of those align with the current federal government’s stated priorities, including housing, physical and digital infrastructure, reshoring supply chains and generating cleaner energy.

They include more than $250 billion in investments the pitch materials say would address Canada’s “chronic undersupply of housing.” The firm proposes partnering with its real estate arm, Brookfield Residential, to develop housing for sale and buy companies that build mixed-use developments that include housing. 

Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have created big investment opportunities in digital infrastructure, notes the deck, including more than $15 billion for new data centres and over $40 billion to build out a domestic semiconductor supply chain. 

Brookfield’s pitch on renewable energy investments, meanwhile, highlights a potential partnership with oilsands lobby group Pathways Alliance on carbon capture and storage projects, and a collaboration with Ottawa and the Canada Growth Fund to guarantee a price for carbon credits. 

Nuclear energy is another area of interest, the presentation shows, with more than $50 billion in “identified opportunities,” including partnerships with nuclear services firm Westinghouse—in which Brookfield owns a majority stake. Earlier this week, Brookfield joined 13 other financial institutions in endorsing an international declaration to triple nuclear energy by 2050. 

Brookfield provides examples of past deals that would have been a fit for the proposed fund—involving companies whose enterprise values have soared in recent years.

They include an investment in a “leading freight railway in North America,” the “privatization of Crown-owned electricity transmission and distribution utility,” an “investment in global convenience store and retail fuel operator undergoing succession transition,” and the “privatization and turnaround of global engineering and construction company.” 

Critics of the Liberals’ overtures toward the pension funds have said those funds would invest more in Canada if the opportunities were attractive. 

After reviewing the pitch documents, Randall Bartlett, Desjardins’ senior director of Canadian economics, said the proposed targets make sense, within the limited universe of Canadian investments.

“I think the asset classes that they’ve identified are asset classes where there’s a lot of investment opportunity in Canada,” he said.

The trouble, he said, is that the “Maple Eight” pension funds don’t want to concentrate too much money in one country because they want to diversify their risks, and the investments they do make in Canada have to be more lucrative than others available elsewhere.

“They’re choosing to invest abroad not just for diversification reasons, but also because they can get higher yields on similar assets in other parts of the world,” he said. Creating a list of appealing Canadian investments doesn’t address either problem.

Investors would also want much more detail than the documents provide on what the federal government would get in exchange for its $10-billion stake, Bartlett added. If the government had a say, that could make a big difference in how the funds were used.

“What types of assets does the federal government want to be seen investing in?” he asked.

If politicians got to sign off on Maple Fund investments, that could create additional challenges, he said. Politicians’ priorities change—especially when an election puts different ones in power.

The deck says Brookfield and the pension funds would have seats on the fund’s board. It doesn’t mention one for the government.

Brookfield describes the proposed fund as a collaboration with Canada’s biggest pension fund managers, listing nine of them in the deck: Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Alberta Investment Management Corporation, British Columbia Investment Management Corporation, Public Sector Pension Investments, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan and Investment Management Corporation of Ontario. 

(The last of those is not among the Maple 8 because it isn’t a pension fund itself, but it manages tens of billions of dollars in investments for Ontario public-sector institutions and some smaller pensions.)

Brookfield and the investors named in the documents have about $3.3 trillion in combined assets under management.

None of the investors responded to The Logic’s request for comment by publication time.