Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec

My name is Lucy Fitz George Parker.

I'm the editor-in-chief at Responsible Investor, and I'm your host for this episode, in which I'll be discussing the future of climate investment with Bertrand Milot, head of sustainability at La Caisse.

Based in Montreal, La Caisse is the manager of Quebec's public pension funds and one of Canada's largest institutional investors with more than $500 billion in assets under management.

Bertrand, welcome to the podcast.

It's great to have you with us.

Yeah, but that utilities number was heavily anchored by a single monumental deal.

Brookfield Asset Management and CDPQ acquired Borlex Inc. at a $9 billion enterprise value.

We also saw notable movement in financials, like Laurentian Bank carving out and selling Fairstone Bank for CA $1.9 billion.

OK,

How do we assemble like.

one solid financing package, right? I'd also say with respect to financing, and this was, you know, a big conversation, you know, last fall on the Margins of the World Nuclear Symposium was the regulated asset-based model, right? And the oversubscription of size, well, see, La Caisse, a big pension fund investor in Quebec, I believe it was 3.2 billion that they put forward for sizeable C.

But really, and that all speaks to, you know, the UK government really coming in to help take on some of that risk and also providing a return during the construction phase.

So it's about a pound per bill that goes on.

I would just one final point along the same sort of vein here.

The idea that our own, you mentioned the Caisse de Depot, they're investors in these privatized airports.

So they're investing overseas, but not in our own.

Absolutely.

And that's the absurdity of it all.

We have some of the world's most experienced and prolific airport infrastructure investors in the Caisse de Depot, in the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement Fund.

You've got the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund.

All of these pension funds are huge owners of some of the world's largest airports, but they can't invest in their own airports in their own country because legislation prevents them.

I wanted to reiterate again that that's not the way I view the field at all.

Just yesterday I gave a talk in Montreal at the, if I can say this right, Caisse de Depot et Placement, which is the big wealth management fund for the province of Quebec.

I met a lot of people there and I never once got the idea that anyone there was evil or grasping.

I think they have a moral purpose, which is to preserve the livelihoods of the people of the province of Quebec.

So who is going to be at this summit and what do you understand that they are after?

so the lineup that is coming out to toronto on september 14th 15th for this so-called canada investment summit is pretty high powered there's going to be the ceo of blackrock which is one of the largest asset managers in the world larry fink a very close friend of carney he's often you know on the scene with carney he's done many events with him he was the one who introduced carney when he was at the world economic forum right before he gave his Davos speech, but also a number of private equity firms, companies like Blackstone, the president of Blackstone, John Gray is going to be there, you know, private equity firm that's become notorious in a lot of circles for the way they've bought up housing in the post 2008. crisis, as well as sovereign wealth funds from places like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and huge pension funds from around the world, from Australia, from Europe and other places.

And so this is an exceedingly high powered lineup of investors.

And the one thing that they share in common is that virtually all of the attendees that have been confirmed so far are investors that are really interested in infrastructure.

And so I think that's one of the things we've been saying pretty consistently about this summit is it's a privatization summit, right? It's not an investment summit in large part.

That is a huge element of what is going on here.

And that is what is bringing out private equity executives, the heads of the sovereign wealth funds and some of the largest pension funds as well.

You know, that's really one of the key points here is that a lot of this is not new money.

So Michelle, what are we looking at here?

So here's Catherine McKenna, and she's with the G7 Investors, and these are all the big pensions, like OMERS, Caisse de Depot, CalPERS, Aviva, etc., etc.

This is the Ontario Teachers.

So birds of a feather hang together.

And his reason for doing this was that he wanted to have a pot of gold here in Alberta that we could make decisions that are good for Alberta's economy.

And the Caisse de Depot in Quebec was sort of the gold standard.

So Quebec money stays in Quebec.

They make decisions about where the money goes in Quebec, and they use it to support the economy of Quebec.