The federal government hosts its investment summit in Toronto on September 14 and 15
IFM Investors will lead a delegation of Australian pension funds to a federal investment summit in Toronto this fall, carrying a mandate from its owners to deploy as much as $10bn in Canadian infrastructure over the next decade if the policy conditions line up.
The Australian manager confirmed to the Financial Post that its delegation will attend the summit the federal government is hosting on September 14 and 15.
“IFM is coordinating the participation of the Australian Super Funds to the summit,” Gian-Carlo Peressutti, IFM’s executive director of public affairs, said in a statement to the outlet.
The $10bn figure comes from Kyle Mangini, IFM’s global head of infrastructure, who said during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s spring visit to Australia that the firm would invest that amount in Canadian assets over 10 years under the “right policy settings.”
IFM manages more than A$230bn for a consortium of industry super funds, and those owners have tapped it to lead the Canadian push.
The mechanism at the centre of the pitch is asset recycling.
Under that model, Peressutti said, a private investor takes over an existing infrastructure asset, adds capital, grows its revenue, and the government either shares in that growth or takes an upfront payment for the right to run the asset over a long term.
The government then redirects that cash to other projects in its pipeline.
In most IFM deals, he added, the government keeps full ownership and leases the asset to a custodian for a fixed period.
Peressutti pointed to Manchester Airports Group in the UK and the Indiana Toll Road in the US as cases where the model works because local stakeholders hold a governance role.
“We view it very much as a partnership, but we are fully cognizant and adherent to the fact that this is and always will be the government’s asset and we are not its owners, we’re its custodians,” he said.
Critics have already labelled the approach a form of privatization as Canada debates whether to open assets such as airports to private investors, and Peressutti rejected the term.
“Our adversaries will throw that word around during the course of the debate that Canada is now having about whether or not this makes sense for assets such as airports. But it’s not a privatization,” he said.
The delegation builds on a memorandum of understanding, formally the CAP Invest Initiative, that nine Australian pension funds and Canada’s Maple Eight signed during Carney’s visit to Australia in March, after the prime minister spent months urging institutional investors to bring capital home.
The Australian funds signed the cooperation agreement with Canadian pensions that include the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, according to the Financial Post, both of which then partnered with Ottawa to host the summit.
Carney has pledged to “catalyze” $1tn in total investment in Canada over five years.
His first budget last November set out $280bn in capital investments and incentives, including $315bn for infrastructure, and flagged airport privatization as under consideration.
In spring 2026, as per the same reporting, his government pledged a $25bn sovereign wealth fund funded partly through asset recycling, or selling established government-owned assets and using the proceeds for priority projects.
IFM has invested in Canada before, each time alongside Canadian institutions.
It acquired Enwave Energy Corp with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in 2021, the Financial Post reported, and took a 37.5 percent stake in Vancouver’s GCT Global Container Terminals in 2018.
The firm opened its first Canadian office in Toronto last December.
Persuasion is what turns the initiative into real dollars now, Peressutti said, since every party to the MoU must convince the public and the Carney government that the deal holds up.
He named the September summit as the moment that matters.
The government wants concrete deals rather than "a show and tell," he said, calling that push "music to our ears" for IFM.
The Australian superannuation model that IFM’s owners represent is drawing wider interest abroad.
US President Donald Trump ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to study the system as US lawmakers weigh retirement reform, Bloomberg reported.
Australia’s model, which requires employers to contribute 12 percent of salaries to privately managed pensions, holds about A$3.1tn and is on pace to become the world’s second-largest retirement plan within a decade.
