It’s probably not news to anyone who reads I3 that Quebec’s leading public pension fund manager — Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec — is the latest in a string of Canadian retirement systems to flex its investment management prowess. The C$215 billion Caisse de dépôt just signed a deal with the Quebec government to jointly invest in and operate infrastructure assets. Not only that, it plans to double its infrastructure portfolio to more than $16 billion during the next four to five years.

If you only read the headlines about the deal, you may have missed that the mandate not only gives Caisse de dépôt a pipeline of infrastructure investments in its own backyard, it also opens the door to use this model to generate additional deals within North America and globally — investment managers have yet another pension-investment manager hybrid competitor.

The agreement notes: “The new model also offers a promising and readily exportable