Euromoney is driving around Toronto on a highway so revered by infrastructure investment specialists one would think it were the Road to Damascus rather than the Road to Clarington, Ontario.
This is the 407, and it’s a fairly dull drive, if truth be told. But in the late 1990s it represented the birth of an asset class, helping to catalyze a sense that had been mounting for some time that Canada’s pension and sovereign wealth funds were among the most innovative in the world. A quarter of a century on, they still are, not only investing in new fields but helping to invent them in the first place.
There is a clear line from the Province of Ontario’s sale of the 407 to a private sector consortium in 1999, to a level of sophistication and heft that we see time and again today. It’s visible in CDPQ investing $5 billion in DP World’s Dubai assets, for example, not through some third-party fund or a consortium but in its own name.
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