Canada is getting its first sovereign wealth fund, Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Monday, with an initial endowment of $25 billion.
A sovereign wealth fund is a state-owned investment fund, that allows a government to invest in projects and investment opportunities across the world.
Carney described it as “essentially a national savings and investment account.”
Several countries around the world, from China and Norway to Australia and Saudi Arabia, have similar state-owned investment funds.
The Canada Strong Fund will “invest alongside the private sector in nation-building projects,” Carney said.
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“We will begin with an initial endowment of $25 billion. Over time, the fund will grow through asset recycling and reinvestment, creating even greater opportunities for future generations,” he said.
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The plans for the fund will be included in the spring economic update on Tuesday, Carney’s office said. The federal government said it will also establish a Canada Strong Fund transition office to “advance a targeted engagement with market participants and regulators,” the Prime Minister’s Office said.
The Canada Strong Fund is Canada’s first national sovereign wealth fund. It will invest in the major projects that are transforming our economy — and give Canadians a direct stake in our nation’s prosperity.
— Mark Carney (@MarkJCarney) April 27, 2026
Individual Canadians will be able to directly invest in the fund, Carney said, though it’s not yet clear how that proposal will work.
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“If you have a little bit of extra money, we’ll make it easy for you to invest in the fund to help build Canada strong, for all,” he added.
Most of the major investment in big projects in Canada will still come from the private sector, he said, with the federal government providing support through loans, grants and other incentives.
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The fund will be “professionally managed and operate as an arms-length, independent Crown corporation,” he said, adding that the government will be consulting over “specific aspects” of the fund.
Carney compared the fund to the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1870s, however, he said some things would be different.
“This time, we are building with Indigenous Peoples as full partners—ensuring meaningful Indigenous ownership and major economic benefits,” he said.
When asked where the money for the fund would come from given the size of the federal government’s deficit, Carney said there would be “good news” on that front during Tuesday’s spring economic statement.
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The range of investments will be “very broad,” beyond just oil and gas, he said.
Managing oil revenue is a key aspect of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, but Norway has a cap on how much of the fund’s spending comes from the oil sector. This is done to protect the broader Norwegian economy from the boom-and-bust cycles typically associated with the oil and gas sector.
This will be harder for Canada to do, given that resource revenue in Canada is not centralized, a report in the McGill Journal of Economics said earlier this month.
The focus of the fund will be on investing within Canada, Carney said, as Canada takes “a lesson from other jurisdictions that had the foresight many decades ago to start sovereign wealth funds.”
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“In some cases, they began with a domestic focus. Then outgrew the scale of the domestic focus,” he said, pointing to the state-owned private investment fund Temasek Holdings in Singapore.
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When it was founded in 1974, Temasek made largely domestic investments in Singapore. Recently, however, it has broadened its scope with global investments.
The “uniqueness” of Canada’s sovereign wealth fund – as opposed to the ones that Nordic countries like Norway have – will be the ability of everyday Canadians to put money in the fund, Finance Minister Francois-Phillipe Champagne said.
“We’re looking at best practices to really set something which would be uniquely Canadian, inspired by best practices in the G7,” Champagne said, speaking to reporters shortly after Carney.
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