I grew up in Alberta. I remember having a sense of pride in our Heritage Fund, so I was pleased to hear that Canada, like Norway, the Gulf States, and Singapore, will have a "Canada Strong Fund."
The fact that Canada sits on the most strategic resource base on the continent, and has not had a fund before now, is one of the greatest economic errors of the last fifty years.
But the fund Carney announced this week is not the fund we need. It is a 19th-century railroad fund with a 21st-century wrapper, and it is missing three things that if added could have made it the most important piece of policy this country has produced in a generation.
What it gets right
The $25 billion the government is going to get it started with is modest by international standards — but hey, you have to start somewhere, and Canada's fiscal position makes a bigger initial commitment harder. The arm's-length structure with an independent board and a CEO insulated from political interference is the right design. The decision to take equity in nation-building projects, rather than just giving loans, is also the right call. It means we get to share in the upside if these projects succeed, rather than just guaranteeing the downside.
The idea that ordinary Canadians can buy into the fund, like a bond, and benefit directly is genuinely democratizing. I remember my Grandmother giving me a $500 bond when I turned 16. I didn't get it until 18 — but I dreamt almost daily about what I would do with it (I used it to learn to fly airplanes). I can imagine people buying these bonds to remind their kids and grandkids of their promise to protect their generation.
Most of the wealth created by Canadian resources has historically flowed to foreign investors and shareholders, not to the Canadians whose land it came from. A retail product turns that around. That alone makes the announcement worth taking seriously.
Lastly, the framing of Indigenous peoples as "full partners with equity stakes" (assuming it survives implementation) is a meaningful step. Equity is not the same as consultation. Equity is the same as ownership. Whether the program delivers on that language remains to be seen, but the language matters.
So: the fund itself, good. The structure, mostly good. The intent, defensible.
Now to what it's missing and what it gets wrong
The Canada Strong Fund, if modeled on the Canadian Pacific Railway — which was built on extraction of land that was not the Crown's to give, on labour that was deliberately racialized and exploited, and on an ecosystem that we are still, 140 years later, trying to figure out how to repair — just won't do. Mark Carney's nice wrapper on the new fund doesn't quite hide the extraction philosophy.
In permaculture, we have a phrase for what happens when you maximize one output while ignoring the system that produces it. We call it extraction. You can do it for a long time. The land or the body or the economy will sustain it for years. And then it stops sustaining it, all at once, and the bill comes due.
A sovereign wealth fund tied to fast-tracked resource projects with weakened environmental review is not nation-building. It is a wealth fund that mines the country to feed itself. The output looks like prosperity. The input is the future.
This is the same logic that runs industrial agriculture (strip the soil, add synthetic fertilizer, externalize the cost). It is the same logic that runs industrial medicine (manage the symptom, sell the drug, ignore the cause).
To address that logic with another version of itself is to misunderstand the problem we are actually facing.
The fund could have been better. It could have been required to invest in projects that meet a closed-loop test — projects that don't extract more than they replace, that don't externalize their costs onto land, water, or future generations. That test exists. It's not exotic. It's been the standard in regenerative agriculture for forty years. The fund's mandate doesn't have it.
That's the first thing it forgot.
The second thing
There is no mention, anywhere in the announcement or the supporting documents — of AI.
This is not a small omission. It is the central economic question of the next decade.
Every major economy is grappling, badly, with the same problem: AI is going to displace large numbers of workers across white-collar and skilled-trades sectors. The technology industry promises that the productivity gains will be so large that the displaced workers will be supported through some form of universal basic income, paid for out of the wealth that AI creates. Don't worry, they say, abundance is coming.
I am not holding my breath.
The same companies promising this abundance are the ones consolidating power faster than any government can regulate, and that gap between cost reductions and price reductions is exactly where their profit margins live. The age of abundance is a marketing campaign. Are they really going to give up their profits?
But here is the thing: a sovereign wealth fund is the exact mechanism that could solve this.
A national investment vehicle that owns equity stakes in Canadian projects and Canadian companies — including, presumably, the AI companies of the future — could, if structured correctly, take the dividends from those investments and distribute them to Canadians in the form of an AI-displacement supplement.
This is not a wild idea. Alaska does a version of it with the Permanent Fund Dividend, paid out of the state's oil wealth. Norway uses its fund to buffer the entire welfare state. The structural design of citizens owning equity in the country's productive base, with returns flowing back to citizens, is exactly what a sovereign wealth fund is for.
Carney's fund could have built this in from day one. "As Canadian companies and projects generate returns, a portion of those returns will be distributed annually to all Canadians, indexed to displacement caused by automation and AI." One sentence. It would have changed the entire conversation. It would have made Canada the first country in the world with a structural answer to the AI labour problem.
It is not in the announcement. It may come later today in the spring economic update to be delivered to the House of Commons — we'll see.
The third gap
The third gap is harder to name, because it isn't economic. It is philosophical.
A sovereign wealth fund is, fundamentally, a statement about who a country is for. Norway's fund is for the Norwegian people, present and future, including those not yet born. Its mandate is explicit about intergenerational equity. The board is required to think in 50-year and 100-year time horizons. Investments that would benefit current Norwegians at the expense of future Norwegians are excluded by mandate.
The Canada Strong Fund's mandate, as announced, is "to finance major projects of national interest." That language is not bad — but it is also not sufficient — because national interest can be defined by whoever happens to be in cabinet on any given Tuesday. It is a moveable target.
Future generations, by contrast, are a constituency that cannot lobby, cannot vote, and cannot be bought. They have to be written into the mandate explicitly, or they will not be there at all.
Norway figured this out in 1990. Carney's fund could have done the same. It did not, at least not yet.
What I want, instead
I am not, despite the tone of this post, against the Canada Strong Fund. I am against the Canada Strong Fund as currently designed. Three changes — none of them complicated, none of them controversial — would turn it from a 19th-century artifact into a 21st-century instrument:
One. A closed-loop investment test. Projects must demonstrate that they replace what they extract, or they don't get fund equity. This is not radical. It is what good farmers, good foresters, and good engineers already do.
Two. A citizen's dividend mechanism. A portion of fund returns, indexed to AI and automation displacement, flows back to Canadians annually.
Three. An intergenerational mandate, written into the charter. The board must consider the interests of Canadians not yet born when it makes investment decisions. This is the simplest of the three to implement, and the one with the largest long-term consequence.
These three things would not slow the fund down. They would not reduce its returns. They would, over time, increase both. A fund that invests in extraction-first projects under fast-tracked environmental review is going to face the same wall every other extraction-first economy has hit, eventually. A fund that invests in closed-loop projects, distributes returns to citizens, and operates under an intergenerational mandate is going to outlast the people who designed it — and that is, in fact, the point of a sovereign wealth fund.
We have a chance, in the coming months, while Champagne's office is still designing the implementation details, to ask for the better version. Not the version that papers over the deficit and gets fast-tracked through a friendly cabinet. The version that, fifty years from now, our grandchildren will look at and say: they built that for us, and they did it right.
The fund is good. The fund could be great. It is not yet great.
That's worth saying out loud, before the cement sets.
What you can do
If you think this fund should be built to last, call or write your Member of Parliament.
Encourage them to support:
- A closed-loop investment test
- A citizen's dividend tied to AI and automation
- An explicit intergenerational mandate
These details are not locked yet. They are being decided now.
If enough people ask for the better version, we might still get it.