Canadians Don’t Need a Sovereign Debt Fund
Ottawa, ON – For 11 years, Canada’s economy has stalled as investment fled and the federal debt ballooned. Now the Liberals are pitching a ‘sovereignty wealth fund’. But unlike Norway or Saudi Arabia, which unblocked their resources to unleash their wealth, Carney continues to block our resources and run a massive deficit to create the world’s first Sovereign Debt Fund.
Without a budget surplus or additional resource revenue from new major projects, Carney is borrowing another $25 billion for another agency that repeats the same promises Liberals have been making for over a decade.
In 2016, the Liberal government hosted an investment summit with international investors, promising to unblock their trillions in combined assets to invest in Canada. The result was not a boon in foreign investment, but the Canada Infrastructure Bank (CIB), with a pool of $35 billion of taxpayer dollars and promises that it would attract multiples of private investment.
Michael Sabia, now Carney’s hand-picked Clerk of the Privy Council, claimed that, “every dollar of federal commitment triggers, say, four or five dollars from people like us. So you get this tremendous multiplication impact.” Also in favour? Carney’s Ambassador to the US, Mark Wiseman, then senior managing director of BlackRock, the firm that organized the conference and worked directly with civil servants to promote the bank.
But according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, far from bringing in private sector investment, when all levels of government are included, two out of every three dollars for projects that the CIB funds come from the public sector, including 11 percent from other federal ‘partners.’
Worst of all, since its inception, the CIB has cumulatively lost almost a quarter billion – $276.2 million – on its loans. For the first seven years of operation, income from the CIB’s investments failed to even cover their operating costs, including salary and administration.
Now, Carney is recycling the same failed Liberal ideas with a second summit in September and a sovereign debt fund that replicates the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Desjardins wrote that “the proposed CSF draws a lot of parallels with previously announced investment vehicles, like the Canada Infrastructure Bank,” and the Montreal Economic Institute said the fund “is essentially the Canada Infrastructure Bank under a different name.”
If Canadians had invested their portfolio in the CIB, they would have lost money. But it’s been great for well-connected insiders, with over $250 million spent on operating costs, including a $600,000 salary for the CEO and over $8 million in bonuses in 2024/25. Now Carney is going to spend millions more on salaries for a transition office while taxpayers continue to lose out.
We have seen that this playbook doesn’t work from the CIB to the Canada Growth Fund to the Major Projects Office, which has yet to approve a single project. We don’t need Deja Vu all over again.
It’s time for real change that ends the carve-outs, handouts and bailouts for Liberal insiders and repeals the Liberals’ red tape, bureaucracy and taxes to get projects built that will deliver sovereign wealth for Canadians.