Getting real with its members: OMERS talks up renewables and shoots down pipelines at its annual meeting
At OMERS’ annual meeting on April 23, 2026, it was a breath of fresh air to hear senior leadership focus on the underlying drivers of the energy transition instead of the current political noise around building new fossil fuel infrastructure. Stakeholders may still be concerned, however, about OMERS’ intentions regarding investments in liquified natural gas (LNG). Here is Shift’s summary of the climate-related key points from OMERS’ annual meeting.
New fossil fuel development and pipelines don’t make financial sense
OMERS Board Chair George Cooke pointed out that new fossil fuel pipelines and greenfield developments don’t make financial sense for the OMERS portfolio. Responding to a question from OMERS member Lee Ramsay, Cooke said:
Lee, my sentiment that I tried to convey to you at the time, in the discussion respecting new pipeline builds, greenfield developments of that sort, would have an incredibly small, virtually zero chance, of being something that would make sense for us to take part in.
Your aversion is largely driven because they have fossil fuels. Whether I share that or not is irrelevant. My concern with those types of investments are the risks associated with them. Not only because of the climate aspect, but because of the financial aspect and the fact that they take years to build across many changes in government. Which cause – usually cause – tremendous losses and overruns.
That's not the type of asset that we've been invested in. And I can't see why that would be the case going forward. Again, I guess you can never say never – I may not be here. But they don't make sense to me. For someone like us.
(Video at 02:25:27, emphasis added)
Cooke was reiterating a position he’d taken during an appearance at the City of Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee on April 7, 2026. At that meeting, Councillor Dianne Saxe asked about OMERS’ future investments in fossil fuel infrastructure, noting that “If you put all of our money into building new pipelines, new LNG facilities, new fossil fuel things, they’ll have a lifetime more than 2050 and they’ll do damage for a long time.” Cooke’s response did not address LNG, but he did tell the Committee that “we will not be investing in a new pipeline” (video beginning at 02:23:50).
New power supply increasingly comes from profitable renewable energy
At the annual meeting, OMERS’ Chief Legal and Sustainability Officer Michael Kelly underlined the tailwinds for renewables: new energy demand is increasingly being met by cost-competitive renewable energy.
“Look, the good news is, even in the United States, we're building out the power grids. 85–90% of that new power supply coming on is renewables. You don't hear that a lot. [People say] the United States is going the other way. But we are building out this infrastructure so that at some point the fossil fuels that are still required today will greatly diminish.”
(Video at 01:45:57, emphasis added)
“The beauty about things like solar now is that the investments stand on their own. When I was in the infrastructure team 15, 20 years ago, we worried about wind and solar because they relied on government policy to make it profitable. But that’s not the case now. The cost of solar panels, in particular, have come down. And so they are profitable on their own, without the government policy, which is why you see it happening.”
(Video at 02:03:15, emphasis added)
Kelly also spoke about the investment potential of the energy transition and the overall “tailwinds” for renewables:
“But we're also, across the spectrum, looking at whatever opportunities might come out of the energy transition. We're trying to change, you know, a system, over time, that's been here for 150, 200 years, so there's trillions of dollars of investment opportunities across – around the world, including in Canada.”
(Video at 2:02:10)
“And there's a lot of tailwinds around renewables right now, notwithstanding all the politics that you hear, so we're optimistic about that.”
(Video at 02:04:25, emphasis added)
Concerns remain: OMERS on LNG and gas
The above quotes suggest that OMERS, from the governance level down, has made significant progress in its understanding of climate change and the energy transition. When senior leadership, including the Board Chair, make such definitive statements in public about the financial downside of backing new fossil fuel investments, it likely indicates that the internal debate has been resolved.
However, a close read of what Cooke and Kelly did and didn’t say shows that OMERS members should still be concerned that their pension fund may place bets on gas assets, including LNG.
Cooke’s remarks to the City of Toronto’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee notably did not address Councillor Saxe’s questions about investments in LNG. At the annual meeting, Kelly, answering a question (at 02:23:25) about whether OMERS would invest in projects that prolong or expand the use of fossil fuels, noted that such projects would have to pass a “high bar” of assessment from OMERS. But he left the investment door open, drawing a distinction between new LNG infrastructure and “existing LNG that’s already built” and saying that “Gas might be different than oil.”
Given the absence of definitive statements on LNG and gas, one might reasonably assume that this is a live debate inside OMERS.
Shift has outlined the financial, legal, and environmental risks of such LNG investments in The federal government is pressuring your pension fund to invest in LNG and pipelines. These concerns are also supported by additional independent analyses, such as Investors for Paris Compliance’s February 2026 report The LNG Casino: Who Wins and Who Loses? and the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s December 2025 report How Canadian LNG Impacts the Climate: Carbon emissions, fuel switching, and cleaner alternatives.
Two recent reports from Carbon Tracker, Fading Fortunes and Petro-Provinces at Risk, outlined the financial precarity of Canada staking its energy future on fossil exports. Since the publication of those reports, the energy shock brought on by the United States and Israel’s attacks on Iran has begun to reshape fossil fuel dependency long-term, with importing countries accelerating electrification, battery storage and renewable energy to secure energy sovereignty.
The role OMERS can play: communicating about climate for the sake of its members
Senior leaders at OMERS are beginning to demonstrate that they can effectively communicate the tailwinds propelling the rise of renewables and the financial risks of fossil fuel development. This communication to members, stakeholders and policymakers is critical to make the transition off fossil fuels happen quickly enough to stave off large-scale environmental and economic collapse. As Kelly noted in his remarks, we need to “get on society as a whole” (01:47:20).
OMERS has significant potential to lean into such communication, and can take its cue from the examples of other climate-leading pensions.
OMERS could help its members connect the dots between climate change, affordability and pension security
OMERS talks to its members about the gender pension gap, longer life expectancy, and even about TikTok investing influencers – but hasn’t spelled out that members’ near-term and long-term realities are fundamentally affected by fossil fuel-driven global heating. Climateflation is already making life more expensive for OMERS members. Extreme weather events mean insurance premiums are rising, while some properties have become uninsurable. And a world that warms beyond the temperature thresholds of the Paris Agreement will threaten the very foundations of the pension model, which is predicated on a stable climate.
OMERS made a tiny step toward talking about climate change, wildfire smoke, fossil fuel-generated chemicals and health in a recent OMERS Community post from the fund’s Chief Medical Officer about Emerging environmental threats in cancer. It’s a small start – and next, we suggest the folks behind OMERS’ The Pension Blueprint podcast take a listen to [Overshoot] Part 3: The Minsky Moment and then think through how to summarize it for their members.
OMERS could work with its pension peers to urge Canada’s government to accelerate the energy transition
In the Netherlands, the five largest pension fundsurged the government to collaborate with pension funds, municipalities, utilities and other public agencies to drive the country’s “necessary energy transition”. In a joint letter addressed to political parties ahead of the 2024 election, the funds called on the government “to play a leading role and keep providing clear multi-year policy on the energy transition and themes including CO2 pricing, green tax measures, encouraging emissions reduction, renewable energy and innovations.”
Here in Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government seems badly in need of a similar intervention.
OMERS could call out the risks of fossil fuel infrastructure in Canadian media
In a French-language interview in Le Devoir in April 2026, La Caisse’s Head of Sustainability, Bertrand Millot, urged caution when it comes to investments in gas development, warning that such investments would lead to decades of carbon lock-in.
Such plain language warnings about new fossil fuel infrastructure are mostly absent from Canada’s English language media, a gap OMERS could help fill.
OMERS could publicly outline board-level failures at oil and gas companies
In April, Australian superfund HESTA voted against board members at Woodside Energy, that country’s biggest oil and gas company. HESTA issued a public statement about the company’s transition risk, the board’s failure to challenge the assumptions underlying the company’s oil and gas strategy, and a sustainability committee unequipped to navigate a more ambitious approach to the energy transition.
Similar steps are warranted in Canada:
oil and gas companies have withheld investor-critical climate disclosures;
energy sector companies on Climate Engagement Canada’s focus list have demonstrated an overall failure to align on climate; and
oil and gas companies’ audited financial statements are being challenged for systematically downplaying decommissioning liabilities (see Investors for Paris Compliance’s November 2025 report, Accounting for the Canadian Oil & Gas Liabilities Gap).
An accelerated energy transition serves the best interests of OMERS’ 665,000 members
OMERS members are working outdoors in extreme heat and wildfire smoke in the summer and in sweltering classrooms in June and September, dealing with the aftermath of flooding, and caring for community members with heat-exacerbated health conditions. Climate change is real for them now, and it’s real for their retirements.
Pension funds’ best financial outcomes are associated with the lowest possible amount of warming. Every tenth of a degree of warming beyond 1.5°C significantly increases the risk of hitting climate tipping points and triggering devastating cascading effects.
For the sake of its portfolio and its members’ retirements, OMERS should continue to speak plainly to its members about fossil fuel risks and renewable energy tailwinds; avoid investments in LNG that will prolong or expand fossil fuel use; and step up its game in communicating about climate to stakeholders and policymakers. Write to OMERS today!
OMERS’ annual meeting also included notable mentions of Indigenous rights and free, prior and informed consent. Watch for a forthcoming analysis from Shift on Canadian pension funds and Indigenous rights.