In April, Mark Carney stood up and promised Canadians something new: the country’s first national sovereign wealth fund. He called it the Canada Strong Fund. It would get $25 billion over three years, invest in Canadian projects at arm’s length from government, and even let ordinary Canadians buy in through a “retail investment product.”
Six months later, the government still can’t say when the fund will launch or exactly how it will work. That’s not an opposition talking point. It’s what CBC News reported this morning, after asking the Finance Minister’s office for an update.
Big announcement, no follow-through
According to CBC, Ottawa hasn’t set a rollout date. It hasn’t named who will run the arm’s-length agency that’s supposed to manage the money. The Crown corporation that would house the fund still has to be created, and people still have to be appointed to it.
The answer from Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s office was, in effect, “wait for the budget.” Spokesperson John Fragos told CBC the November 5 budget will include a “significant” update. “In due course, we’ll have outlined who the CEO will be, who the board will be,” he said.
“In due course” is doing a lot of work there. This was the headline item of the government’s Spring Economic Update, which described the fund as a way to make sure “the returns from Build Canada Strong are shared with Canadians.” Half a year on, there is no CEO, no board, and no date.
A “wealth fund” built on borrowed money
The bigger problem is where the money comes from.
Sovereign wealth funds usually exist because a government has extra money to save. Norway’s fund and Alberta’s Heritage Fund were built on oil and gas revenue. As CBC notes, these funds are “often used as a way to spend surplus money.”
Canada doesn’t have a surplus. It has a deficit. The day before CBC’s story, the Parliamentary Budget Officer’s October outlook projected a federal deficit of $63.3 billion for 2026-27.
“Generally, sovereign wealth funds are generated from surpluses accumulated by the government,” Conservative finance critic Michael Chong told CBC. “The government of Canada is not currently in a surplus.”
So Ottawa is planning to borrow money and then invest it, and to call that a wealth fund. Families who run up a credit card to buy stocks don’t call that savings. Neither should Ottawa.
Borrowing is running far ahead of the deficit
The PBO’s new report shows why this matters. Over the next five years, it projects cumulative deficits of $333.3 billion. But federal borrowing is projected to rise by $732.9 billion over the same period, because the government is borrowing “to finance loans, capital investments, defence procurement and other financial assets.”
In plain terms, a lot of the new debt won’t show up in the deficit figure Ottawa likes to talk about. Investment vehicles like the Canada Strong Fund are exactly the kind of spending that adds to the debt without looking like ordinary spending.
The PBO projects the federal debt-to-GDP ratio will rise every year, from 40.8 per cent in 2026-27 to 42.6 per cent in 2030-31. Federal debt per person is projected to climb from $33,436 in 2026-27 to $39,191 in 2030-31. The budget officer’s own verdict on the government’s fiscal rules was blunt: “the two fiscal anchors have imposed limited fiscal discipline on government spending and borrowing.”
Parliamentary Budget Officer Annette Ryan has also warned senators about where interest costs are headed. According to testimony reported by the Toronto Sun, she said debt interest is moving from 10 cents of every revenue dollar toward 14 cents within a couple of years, and that reaching 18 or 20 cents would put Canada in a “danger zone.”
Ottawa already has funds like this
Even setting the debt aside, it’s fair to ask what the Canada Strong Fund would do that existing programs don’t.
Ottawa already has the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Indigenous Loan Guarantee Corporation, and the $15-billion, arm’s-length Canada Growth Fund, CBC points out. The government’s own spokesperson says a review of all federal investment programs is under way to make sure they don’t overlap. That review is still ongoing.
“I don’t know why specifically there’s a need to set up a special fund for this,” Carleton University economist Dana Galizia told CBC. Galizia added that while that doesn’t make it a bad idea, “without the details, I’m not really clear on what the value is here.”
Colin Busby of the C.D. Howe Institute raised another concern: even at arm’s length, the fund will have to pick which projects and companies get money. “By picking and choosing winners in very distinct parts of the country, it creates a bit of a hurdle and a bit of a political challenge,” he said.
A pattern, not a one-off
Chong called the fund “an example of many announcements the government has made that they either have either failed to provide sufficient financial information about or have failed to execute upon.”
That’s hard to argue with. The Carney government is very good at announcing. Its press releases are full of words like “bold” and “nation-building.” But the follow-through is far weaker. Here, the result is a $25-billion promise with no start date, no leadership, a retail product that’s still being designed, and funding that will have to be borrowed.
Canadians were promised a stake in building the country. So far, what they actually have is a bigger share of the debt.
Sources: CBC News, Oct. 21, 2026; Parliamentary Budget Officer, Economic and Fiscal Outlook, Oct. 20, 2026; Department of Finance Canada, Canada Strong Fund backgrounder, April 2026; Spring Economic Update 2026, Chapter 1; Toronto Sun, Oct. 10, 2026.
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