P3 or not P3? Big pension funds hope for new infrastructure opportunities

"We're actually quite heartened by that, because Canada has not had a lot of infrastructure opportunity," Deborah Allan, director of communications for the $96-billion Teachers fund, said Friday.

Teachers announced Thursday evening it is paying US$2.4 billion to Orient Overseas of Hong Kong for Deltaport at Roberts Bank south of Vancouver and Vanterm in the Burrard Inlet inner harbour - which operate under long-term leases with the federal Vancouver Port Authority - as well as the New York Container Terminal on Staten Island and the Global Terminal and Container Systems complex in Bayonne, N.J.

The Canadian and U.S. port terminals are of roughly equal value, said Jim Leech, who heads the Teachers fund's private capital portfolio.

In the wider Canadian infrastructure world, "the main complaint that pension funds have had is whether or not the levels of government have the political will to have public assets owned by private enterprise," Leech said.

"You've got some people ideologically opposed, believing that all public infrastructure - highways, airports, et cetera - should be owned 100 per cent by the government, and taxes should just go up to fix them," he said.

"We've been sitting on the sidelines, waiting for the debate to be had and somebody to make a decision."

In the meantime, Teachers' foreign infrastructure investments include Scotia Gas Networks in Scotland and England, 10 power plants internationally, and the Northumberland Water Group in the U.K., along with large timber tracts in New Zealand and the United States.

Other Canadian pension funds have also gone abroad. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board last month put $1.05 billion into British water utility AWG PLC, its largest infrastructure investment to date.

The volume of pension fund money going into infrastructure is increasing globally, observed Andrew Harrison, a pension specialist at law firm Borden Ladner Gervais.

"The principal reason is that these, by their nature, are long-term assets - and that's the key in a pension fund, where you've got people who are accruing benefits today who won't see their last payment out of the fund for 50 or 60 years," he said.

Infrastructure "also tends to provide some inflation protection, in that the payments off the infrastructure tend to rise over time."

The only potential pitfall he sees is that infrastructure assets "tend to be illiquid; if something does happen it's very hard to unload one of these investments."

Rock Lefebvre, vice-president of research at CGA-Canada, observed that defined-benefit pension funds can't depend on safe fixed-income instruments to cover their future liabilities.

"They have to risk, so this is a fairly nice risk for all the parties involved."

Domestic infrastructure would have the extra advantage of eliminating currency risk, but fund managers have been complaining for years that Canada's governments have been slow to allow private money into public projects.

"Governments are starting to realize that they can't fund all the infrastructure investment that has to happen," said Harrison, who heads the government relations committee of the Association of Canadian Pension Management.

"You've got these enormous capital pools in Canada to pay benefits to Canadians. There does seem to be a symmetry to using that money to invest in the infrastructure those same Canadians use."

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