Since 2014, IREI had hosted its annual VIP Infrastructure conference (formerly i3 Conference) in Toronto, until the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. This year will be remembered for many things, mostly depressing and difficult. But often out of catastrophe comes renewal and change. Hopefully, that is where we are headed — advancing to better societies.

We picked Toronto as the location for our infrastructure conference in part because Canadian pensions are leaders in real assets investing, including infrastructure. This leadership is due in part to other characteristics of Canadian pensions — governance and investment excellence.

The headline of a recent Institutional Investor article “The World’s Best Pension Funds are Canadian. Sorry” should strike everyone as insightful and humorous. The article is based on research by McGill University and CEM Benchmarking, The Canadian Pension Fund Model: A Quantitative Portrait.

Another study