Leo de Bever on Why The Maple 8 Should Invest More Wisely at Home
The Canadian Maple 8 argues that investing more in at-home is unwarranted because it conflicts with ‘prudent’ geographic risk diversification.
It implicitly assumes that all Canadian assets are highly correlated and that no domestic investments could improve on the current asset mix.
The real reason is simpler. I used to invest in faraway places and rarely got a reaction. When you invest at home, everyone has an opinion, and boards and portfolio managers become worried about personal returns on risk.
The economic models we used when I was at the Bank of Canada in the 1970s assumed that the bulk of domestic savings went into domestic investment, thereby building a stronger economy. Much greater capital mobility has made that less of a given.
Inadvertently, the Maple 8 (with rare exceptions) exports capital and imports innovation. I have found that Canada has no shortage of entrepreneurs, but they lack the capital to commercialize their technologies, particularly in non-glamorous areas that make Canadian housing, food, and energy more affordable.
I know that my former colleagues will disagree and why. But to put it succinctly: the Maple 8 currently visits the asset store and buys from what is on the shelves.
But their very size allows them to nurture new assets better than cyclical sources of capital, providing higher total return on risk for them, and a better standard of living for many Canadians.
Before I give you my thoughts, some more food for thought on what Leo de Bever is working on nowadays (he's working on a few projects).
In September 2025, Donna Kennedy-Glans reported on how the big federal housing plan has a roadblock: the Canadian government itself:
Over a 40-year-career, Leo de Bever has had a hand on the tiller inside eight financial institutions — in Canada, the U.S., Japan and Australia.
For nearly a decade, he ran the risk department at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan; he was hired to advise the Norwegians on managing their sovereign wealth; and when Alberta Investment Management corporation (AIMCo) was spun off as a Crown corporation in 2008, Leo was the guy recruited by the Alberta government to manage those sovereign wealth and pension assets.
All that experience inside the machine left him with an existential question about the machine: “How do you build innovation — and innovation incentives — into a bureaucracy?”
He’s asking that question again now, because I asked to speak to him about Mark Carney’s promise to launch Canada’s most ambitious housing plan since the Second World War. Build Canada Homes, a yet-to-be-created Crown corp., will get the feds back into the business of building affordable housing, including on public lands, and is set to spend billions to “catalyze” the housing industry and finance “innovative” prefabricated home builders.
De Bever, a PhD economist born in the Netherlands now living in a small community outside Calgary, shares Canadians’ anxiety about housing affordability, especially the intergenerational divide created by historically unprecedented income and wealth inequality.
“Young families (those under 35) were equally represented across income quintiles (statistics) in 1975,” Leo shares in a recent conversation. “Today, they make up two-thirds of the bottom 50 per cent of lower-income households in Canada.”
So Leo’s not questioning the government’s ambitious plan. But he fears the Ottawa machine may not be up to it.
“Who in government has done innovation?” he asks, and gives an example of what he means:
To make housing affordable, you have to bring the costs down by about 50 per cent, Leo posits. “If you give public land, as in Crown-owned land, that property has to be in the right place, or you have to do a swap of some sort,” Leo observes. “Yeah, OK,” he says, “I just think that it will be very hard for traditional bureaucrats to do this.
“They’re just setting up another company (Build Canada Homes) and giving it a mandate,” Leo suggests. “It’s going to take 18 months,” he predicts, “and then they’ll be so-so; they’ll work with large companies because they don’t want a failure on their hands.”
Leo knows governments sometimes have a role — he cites Alberta premier Peter Lougheed’s decision decades ago to step in and co-operate with the private sector to develop oil sands technology. And he knows Canadians need more affordable housing and he’s personally investing — his own time and resources — into community-led projects to achieve that end.
In the northern Alberta town of Athabasca (home of the first post-secondary in Canada to specialize in distance education), Leo is working with the municipal council on a prefab housing project; in a rural B.C. community, he’s helping to advance an affordable recreational community overlooking a lake; in locations outside Calgary, he’s devising new ways to build accessible and health-care supported retirement subdivisions.
“There is a view that stability in home prices can be achieved by replacing urban core detached homes with more densely spaced condominiums or apartment towers,” Leo explains. But he’s not convinced that’s a solution: “The rising average cost of transportation, utilities and other urban infrastructure under already congested conditions could easily offset that effect,” he says.
Instead, Leo’s encouraging investment in housing outside of urban centres, in locations where available land offers a cost advantage and telecommunication infrastructure is reliable. In towns like Athabasca, Alta., Leo suggests “lower-cost modular homes can be brought to an attractive physical environment, as a catalyst for employment, long-distance workers, and economic activity.” What he’s envisioning in Athabasca could be a proof of concept for the Carney government’s Build Canada Homes.
Modern telecommunication technology has diminished the advantage of concentrated urban centres, he adds, “making it easier to adopt a ‘polycentric’ model, where jobs and activities can be moved to satellite communities, where land is less costly.”
With a smile, Leo assures me he isn’t necessarily suggesting companies follow in Elon Musk’s footsteps — relocating Tesla from California to set up a company town in a lower-density, lower-cost land base in Texas.
Finding housing solutions across Canada — community by community — will require fresh thinking. And based on a career spent on the inside of big pension companies and government financial institutions, Leo’s skeptical of bureaucrats’ motivation to innovate. “They stay stuck in a mould,” he asserts, “that’s the problem with big companies and big government.”
How did a guy steeped in decades of big finance become a champion of “small is beautiful”? Leo doesn’t bristle at the question; he even admits to getting caught up in the “bigger is better” culture.
“At AIMCo, I had the same issue, and I only realized afterwards. If you are within that organization and you spend your time on $10 million, $20 million worth of investing, there is a notion that you’re not earning your keep. Because that’s the culture,” he says with a shrug.
“It even was the case when I did something innovative for Teachers,” he continues. “Infrastructure wasn’t a thing when I started doing it, and my colleagues hated it … on the fixed income side, they said, ‘Oh, too much risk,’ and on the private equity side, ‘Not enough money.’”
Notwithstanding, Leo persisted and invested in infrastructure. “Bob Bertram (OTPP’s first chief investment officer) let me do it,” Leo recalls, “and I realized that without the Bob Bertrams of this world, these organizations don’t change.”
No doubt about it, thank god for Bob Bertram, OTPP's inaugural CIO and arguably its best one ever (and there were other exceptional ones).
Bob Bertram wasn't afraid to take risks, to go where others didn't venture and he took the right risks at the right time, benefiting from first-mover advantage.
Nowadays, the Maple 8 funds pretty much all do the same thing; there are some differences obviously, some are more exposed to private markets, some operate differently (like La Caisse and its dual mandate or OMERS taking third-party assets in real estate and infrastructure) but their approach to public and private markets is pretty much uniform.
They all rely heavily on their strategic partners to invest and co-invest in major assets, reducing fee drag.
And it's all about investing in scale to move the needle, which is why they are all waiting for the federal, provincial and other governments to privatize infrastructure asset sin Canada.
But what Leo de Bever is talking about is to invest more domestically and kickstart technologies that are ripe for long-term asset managers with a long investment horizo, even if they're not big and glamorous projects.
I must admit, it's a tough sale. Our large pension funds already invest in venture growth funds, mostly in the US, and what Leo de Bever is looking at isn't exactly Canadian venture capital but it's not big enough to move the needle even if some of these projects merit a hard look.
The closest thing that comes to the activity he's talking about is the Canada Growth Fund which PSP Investments manages on behalf of the federal government. And their ticket size is $50 million and up.
But I think Leo wants to expand the mandate, breadth and scope of such risky investments across all the Maple 8 funds, and before you dismiss him for talking up his book (which he freely admits), his ideas merit some reflection, perhaps now more than ever.
Again, the perfect example, Leo is widely considered the "godfather of infrastructure" in Canada but if it wasn't for Bob Bertram back then, his idea would have never seen the light of day.
Should Canada's Maple 8 get out of their comfort zone and start doing "riskier projects" domestically to help fund and commercialize ideas?
Maybe, it's risky and to be truthful, most of these companies never make it, just like Canadian hedge funds who think they can compete with the big boys down south (most can't, even in the US most hedge funds die, they can't compete with elite hedge funds for a plethora of reasons).
Anyway, I will end it there; Leo de Bever will likely follow up with more comments.
All I know is that while the Maple 8 are looking ot invest billions in domestic infrastructure, maybe it's time to examine ways to invest more directly into companies with a technological edge that need capital to commercialize their venture.
Below, Canada’s agri-food sector is a global leader in trade, but when it comes to attracting growth capital, the numbers tell a different story.
A new report by RBC Thought Leadership,"Seeding Scale: Addressing Canada’s agri-food growth capital gap," outlines the scope and scale of the disconnect between Canada's ag industry size and potential and the amount of money it attracts to fund growth in new companies and tech.
“What we’re finding is that there’s huge valleys in capital that restrict companies from going from that early seed stage all the way to maturity,” says Lisa Ashton, agriculture and nature policy lead at RBC Thought Leadership and author of the report.
While early-stage funding has improved in recent years, scaling companies—particularly those that are asset-heavy, such as equipment manufacturing or food processing—often struggle to secure patient growth capital.
Globally, Canada attracts roughly three per cent of agri-food growth capital. Domestically, agri-food receives about two per cent of federal venture, growth, and infrastructure funding, despite contributing closer to seven to 10 per cent of GDP.
That mismatch points to what Ashton describes as an undercapitalized sector. Beyond capital availability, the report flags regulatory and commercialization challenges, too. Companies cite slow and sometimes unpredictable approval processes, which can push innovators to file patents or scale in other jurisdictions.
Potential solutions include carving out dedicated agri-food allocations within broader federal funds—such as the recently announced $1 billion venture and growth capital initiative—and improving regulatory transparency. Ashton also points to the importance of export-ready thinking from the outset, noting that while Canada may be a smaller domestic market, it can serve as a strong launchpad for global growth.
The full report, Seeding Scale, is available at rbc.com/thoughtleadership.
This is another area Leo de Bever is active in.
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