Trump's global shakeup is complicating life for Canada's $2-trillion pension giants

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board chief executive Jo Taylor and his investing team usually rely on a lot of real-world data when determining where to allocate billions of dollars of investment money on behalf of retirees. But United States President Donald Trump’s flurry of edicts that threaten to upend global trade and geopolitical alliances makes it hard to know what data points they should even be looking at.

“The predictability of what we’re investing in is lower,” Taylor said as pension teams across the country dig into drafting and assessing potential scenarios for a year that, given the prospect of multiple pockets of economic and geopolitical unrest, could be very different from those that came before it. “Looking forward and trying to predict the future is more challenging.”

Globally invested pensions such as Teachers’, particularly those with large exposure to North America, are acknowledging that investment risks are rising as predictability falls, and the uncertainty is not simply tied to a particular region, sector or asset class like it sometimes is.

The policies and rhetoric of the U.S. administration under Trump — including threats of escalating trade tariffs, threats to annex Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada, and warnings about withdrawing traditional military support from European allies that don’t meet North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) funding targets — are essentially exporting risk to governments and companies around the world.

It’s hard to predict Mr. Trump

This, combined with uncertainty of what he will say from day to day and his ever-changing tariff policies, complicates decision-making at globally invested pensions like the eight largest ones in Canada, which together manage