After all the dust settled from Chrystia Freeland’s latest federal budget, I still had questions about the Canada Growth Fund.
Described (on Page 60 of the budget document) as a means “to attract substantial private sector investment” to “help meet important national economic policy goals,” the Canada Growth Fund was announced as something that would be “initially capitalized at $15 billion over the next five years.”
Fifteen billion is big. The budget’s entire chapter on housing, for instance, allocates a total of $10.1 billion in new spending over five years. The military gets a total of $9.4 billion in new spending. Health care, $7.1 billion. But the Canada Growth Fund (let’s just call it the Fund) is bigger than all of those. And for each dollar of the $15 billion it will spend, it will “aim to attract at least three dollars of private capital.”
