Toronto, ON | Traditional territories of the Wendat, Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewas, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation
By investing billions in LNG Canada through American private equity funds, four of Canada’s largest pension funds have ignored their core obligations to their contributors and beneficiaries. These pension funds are gambling their own members’ retirement savings on a high-risk, highly-polluting LNG facility that’s harming local residents and contributing to catastrophic climate change.
This morning, an investor consortium led by Blackstone, in partnership with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO) and Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP), announced that it would invest C$4.33 billion to acquire a 49.9% stake in a Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) subsidiary that holds MC’s stake in LNG Canada – a giant liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal near Kitimat, British Columbia (BC). According to Mitsubishi, the stake in LNG Canada phase 1 that Blackstone and the pension funds are acquiring is valued at C$2.24 billion. The total C$4.33-billion investment “leverages the Funds’ financial resources” to advance the phase 2 expansion of LNG Canada, which, according to Blackstone, “will double the facility’s production to 28 million tonnes per annum, making it one of the largest LNG facilities in the world.”
It is alarming, in the midst of a worsening climate crisis and an unprecedented trade war with the United States, that these pension funds consider it prudent to partner with a Trump-linked private equity firm to risk Canadians’ hard-earned pension dollars on expanding the LNG Canada carbon bomb. LNG Canada is not aligned with the retirement security and best interests of federal and provincial public servants – or the 22 million contributors and beneficiaries of the Canada Pension Plan (CPP).
This irresponsible investment contradicts these pension funds’ own net-zero commitments, climate strategies, and members’ best interests. None of the pension funds involved in the transaction have disclosed how much of their members’ money is actually being gambled on LNG Canada.
Investing in LNG Canada exposes Canadian pension funds to significant financial risks. Taking a stake in the export facility makes these pension funds complicit in health harms to local communities, Indigenous rights violations, and the lock-in of rising climate pollution. The LNG Canada terminal is supplied by Coastal GasLink, the fracked gas pipeline that was forced through Indigenous land by militarized police without the consent of all impacted rights holders.
In 2025, the LNG Canada facility burned more gas than any other LNG export facility on record in the previous year. The gas flaring volumes reported by LNG Canada to the BC Energy Regulator in 2025 are around 50% higher than estimates for the world’s most polluting LNG export terminals in 2024, according to data that was used as the basis for the World Bank’s most recent Global Gas Tracker report.
If fully built, the LNG Canada facility would release more than 2.9 million tonnes (MT) of CO2e per year – the single largest point source of greenhouse gas emissions in BC – and enable another 6.5 MT of upstream emissions. That would further put both BC’s and Canada’s climate obligations out of reach. When the exported LNG is inevitably burned outside of Canada, it would release an estimated 75.2 MT per year of CO2e, significantly worsening the global climate crisis. Contrary to industry talking points, new LNG exports compete primarily with new renewable energy projects in global energy markets, not coal.
In June, Indigenous leaders in British Columbia sent a formal notice to ten of Canada’s largest public pension funds and Export Development Canada (EDC), warning them that purchasing a stake in the LNG Canada export terminal or its proposed Phase 2 expansion would make them complicit in the ongoing violation of Wet’suwet’en rights and title. In October, Indigenous leaders and health and environmental groups announced a legal challenge over EDC’s financing of LNG infrastructure.
LNG Canada is financially risky, as experts warn of a looming oversupply of LNG exports expected to come online into a market with declining demand. Short-term LNG price spikes resulting from the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz mask a significant shift away from new investments in LNG import capacity globally including South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.
Significant new taxpayer subsidies and tax breaks for LNG projects from the federal government may have helped move the Canada LNG expansion to a final investment decision, but cannot ultimately remove the significant financial risks for investors.
Participation in this LNG Canada consortium shreds the credibility of these pension funds on climate and puts them offside with the best long-term interests of the millions of Canadians who pay into them.
Quotes from pension plan contributors and beneficiaries:
“Municipalities and public health officials are calling for an independent investigation into the health impacts of fracking and LNG production in BC – and OMERS is gambling my retirement savings on a massive LNG terminal that’s enabling more fracking?” asks Lee Ramsay, a retired librarian and OMERS member in Toronto. “It’s unacceptable that OMERS is using my pension to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure that undermines my own retirement security while causing harm to the municipal employees working through extreme heat, deadly wildfires and toxic smoke.”
“The CPPIB executives risking the Canada Pension Plan on LNG terminals and fracking expansion seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to climate change and the energy transition,” says Lilian Barrera, a 33-year-old contributor to the Canada Pension Plan. “It’s no wonder that CPPIB is being sued for mismanaging climate risks. What do these CPPIB executives think retirement is going to look like for young Canadians if they keep pouring our money into fossil fuel expansion?”
“Unbelievably, IMCO claims that it has an Indigenous rights strategy while making an investment that, according to Indigenous leaders, is part of an ongoing violation of Wet’suwet’en rights and title,” said Sarah Van Exan, a former contributor to and holder of the Ontario Public Service Pension Fund, which is invested by IMCO. “This investment looks risky from multiple angles.”
“PSP claims that its view on climate change is informed by scientific evidence from the IPCC,” says Ken Johnson, a PSP member, retired federal scientist and epidemiologist, and adjunct professor at the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa. “I’m not aware of any climate scientist that would say it’s a prudent idea for a pension fund to invest the savings of 900,000 federal employees in an LNG carbon bomb while the world is on fire. What the hell is PSP thinking?”
Health impacts of LNG Canada
In 2025, the LNG Canada facility burned more gas than any other export facility on record in 2024. The gas flaring volumes reported by LNG Canada to the BC Energy Regulator in 2025 are around 50% higher than estimates for the world’s most polluting LNG export terminals in 2024, according to data that was used as the basis for the World Bank’s most recent Global Gas Tracker report.
Gas flaring at LNG Canada contains a number of known toxins, including fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) and black carbon – both serious threats to heart and lung health – plus nitrogen dioxide, a primary trigger for asthma, and benzene, a carcinogen so potent there are no “safe” levels of exposure.
Fossil gas also poses threats to public health. While the industry takes steps to limit human exposure, research shows oil and gas fracking can impact birth and respiratory outcomes. When gas is used in the house, it exposes the occupants to air pollutants. When it’s liquefied for export, that’s often done at a facility that flares off excess gas, which also releases pollutants that affect human health. Methane itself, which traps heat in the atmosphere and drives climate change, is on Canada’s toxic substances list.
Contact information for interview requests:
Adam Scott, Executive Director, Shift
adamscott@shiftaction.ca
416-347-3858
Patrick DeRochie, Senior Manager, Shift
patrick@shiftaction.ca
416-576-2701
Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health is a charitable initiative that works to protect pensions and the climate by bringing together beneficiaries and their pension funds to engage on the climate crisis.
Background: How investing in LNG Canada contradicts pension funds’ own climate principles
OMERS’ Climate Action Plan highlights its “efforts to support the transition through real world decarbonization.” OMERS recently told a City of Toronto committee that “Climate change is systemic: It impacts every economic activity, investment, and asset. It is a fiduciary imperative: As a long-term investor, we must understand how it does and will affect the way we invest. It impacts our communities: including our members, stakeholders, employees, and investee companies.”
In its public meeting in Vancouver on October 6, a CPPIB executive called climate change “one of the single biggest sources of risk for a long-term investor” and in Edmonton in February described it as “the single biggest source of risk for the fund.” CPPIB’s first “Climate Change Principle” says CPPIB aims to “Invest for a whole economy transition required by climate change.” Yet in May 2025, CPPIB abandoned its commitment, made in 2022, to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its investment portfolio and operations by 2050. Even before today’s announced investment in LNG Canada, CPPIB had disclosed $28.7 billion in investments in the fossil fuels driving the climate crisis. Its decision to abandon its net-zero commitment last year, alongside its continued investment in fossil fuel expansion, raises serious questions about the credibility of its stated aim to invest for a whole-economy transition. The contradiction between CPPIB's stated climate commitments and its investment activities will also come under scrutiny in court next week, when the first stages of climate risk litigation against the fund are heard in the Ontario Superior Court.
IMCO claims to be committed to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and its 2025 Climate Action Plan called climate change an “urgent and pressing systemic challenge” with “material implications for the world we live in and the assets we manage.” IMCO said that rising global temperatures “reinforc[ed] the urgency of action on climate change” and that the Bank of Canada projects “a material negative impact on the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) if significant GHG emissions reductions are not made”. Further, the investment manager claimed that it was “committed to phasing out investments in new unabated fossil fuel assets where we can meaningfully influence or control investment decisions, in line with appropriate global, science-based scenarios” (pp. 3,6). The investment manager wrote in its 2025 Annual Report that a 2025 “highlight” was having “developed IMCO’s Indigenous Rights strategy” (p. 41).
PSP claims its view on climate change is “informed by scientific evidence from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)” and acknowledges that “climate change is a long-term systemic risk that could have a material impact on investment risks and returns, over time and across different sectors, geographies, and asset classes” (2026 annual report, p. 74). But the investment manager “closed” its 2022-2026 climate strategy, tossing out a detailed taxonomy and a workable strategy with measurable decarbonization targets, and replaced it with a vague pilot framework that lacks clarity, stringency, transparency, accountability and rigour.