Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, a primer.
Manager Watch: 48 depositors, six million people, $517 billion.
La Caisse, formerly CDPQ, is the world's twentieth-largest asset owner and the second-largest Canadian institutional pension manager, with CAD $517 billion in net assets at the end of 2025. Its structure is distinct from the federally-chartered Canadian peers: it manages 48 separate Québec public-sector depositors, of which the nine largest account for 96.6% of net assets, and it operates under the Act respecting the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec rather than federal pension legislation. This primer reads the structure.
The Manager Watch column has covered CPP Investments and Ontario Teachers’ as the federal-mandate and single-plan exemplars of the Canadian Big-Eight cohort. The Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec is the third entry, and the most structurally distinct of the three. CPP Investments serves one plan (the CPP) under federal legislation. Ontario Teachers’ serves one plan (OTPP) under provincial jointly-sponsored legislation. La Caisse serves 48 depositors under Québec provincial legislation, and the shape of its mandate, its governance, and the geography of its capital all follow from that depositor structure.
What it is, on the record.
La Caisse “is a global investment group present in all major markets with 517 billion Canadian dollars in assets and offices in key cities around the world.”[1] It has “grown continuously since [its] creation in 1965.”[1] The site uses “La Caisse” as the operating trade name, with “Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec” as the legal name and CDPQ as the historical acronym.
The mandate, as articulated on the governance page, is “to generate optimal returns for our depositors while contributing to Québec’s economic development.”[2] The dual mandate (returns for depositors plus Québec economic development) is the distinguishing feature versus CPP Investments’ singular “maximize long-term investment returns without undue risk” framing. Both mandates are on the record; both are operationally real; the dual mandate is more visible in La Caisse’s investment activities by design.
The depositor structure, which is the structure.
La Caisse manages funds for 48 depositors, “primarily pension and insurance funds in Québec’s public and parapublic sectors, who represent over six million people.”[3] Three depositor categories: pension funds, insurance plans, and other organizations.
The nine largest depositor funds account for 96.6% of net assets as at December 31, 2025.[3] They are, in order of net assets:
| Depositor | Net assets | Population served |
|---|---|---|
| Québec Pension Plan Fund — base plan | $140.7B | 4.3M contributors / 2.2M beneficiaries / $19.3B in benefits paid annually |
| Retirement Plans Sinking Fund | $131.2B | Government of Québec employer-pension capitalization vehicle |
| Government and Public Employees Retirement Plan | $97.9B | 646,000 contributors / 350,000 retirees / 25,000 surviving spouses or orphans / $8.3B in benefits paid annually |
| Supplemental Pension Plan for Québec Construction Industry Employees | $36.9B | 202,000 contributors / 104,000 retirees or surviving spouses / $1.0B in benefits paid annually |
| Québec Pension Plan Fund — additional plan | $22.8B | Additional QPP architecture |
| Fonds de la santé et de la sécurité du travail | $22.3B | 233,000 contributing employers / 4.3M workers / $3.1B in benefits paid annually |
| Generations Fund | $19.5B | Used to repay Québec’s provincial debt, administered by the Ministère des Finances du Québec |
| Pension Plan of Management Personnel | $14.4B | 37,000 contributors / 37,000 retirees / 4,000 surviving / $1.9B in benefits paid annually |
| Fonds d’assurance automobile du Québec | $14.2B | 5.8M driver’s licence holders / 7.2M registered vehicles / $1.4B in benefits paid annually |
Three things this table makes plain.
La Caisse is fundamentally heterogeneous on the liabilities side. The Government and Public Employees Retirement Plan has a different cash-flow profile than the Construction Industry plan, which has a different profile than the Auto Insurance Fund, which has a very different profile than the Generations Fund (which is a debt-repayment vehicle with no contributor population at all). La Caisse runs an investment platform that has to allocate sensibly across this whole set, not against a single liability stream.
The Québec Pension Plan Fund is large but not dominant. Combined base and additional plans put QPP at $163.5 billion, or roughly 32% of La Caisse net assets. The remainder is split across the public-employees plans, the insurance funds, the debt-repayment Generations Fund, and the smaller depositors.
The Generations Fund is the anomaly worth flagging. It is a debt-repayment vehicle administered by the Ministère des Finances; its investment horizon and return-profile expectations differ from a defined-benefit pension. La Caisse’s allocation choices for this segment will not look the same as its choices for QPP or the public-employees plans.
The asset-class composition at December 31, 2025.
La Caisse’s published snapshot breaks out four asset classes by dollar size:[4]
| Asset class | Net | Share of $517B |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed Income | $176 billion | 34% |
| Private Equity | $85 billion | 16% |
| Infrastructure | $75 billion | 15% |
| Real Estate | $43 billion | 8% |
| Snapshot subtotal | $379 billion | 73% |
| Equity Markets + other | ~$138 billion | ~27% |
The snapshot does not break out Equity Markets, which is published as a distinct asset-class line on the investments-overview page; the remaining 27% covers the public equity book and any unallocated cash or hedges.
Within the named four, the asset-mix posture worth flagging:
- Fixed Income at 34% is substantial. Includes “government bonds, corporate and real estate credit and infrastructure financing.”[4] The credit-and-infrastructure-financing footnote is the part that does not exist as a separate line at most Canadian peers; La Caisse counts it inside the fixed-income aggregate.
- Private Equity at $85 billion is the largest alternatives line. Direct plus funds.[4]
- Infrastructure at $75 billion is the standout cohort-wide. Larger than its real estate book, larger than what most cohort peers carry on infrastructure as a share of total. Includes “ports, airports, highways, wind and solar farms, energy transmission and distribution networks.”[4]
- Real Estate at $43 billion (8%) is meaningfully smaller than the CPP Investments real-estate book and the share that several peers carry. Includes “office buildings, shopping centres as well as residential and logistics properties.”[4]
The performance read.
Performance numbers as at December 31, 2025:[snapshot, performance]
- One-year return: 9.3% (benchmark 10.9%); investment results $42.7B
- Five-year annualized: 6.5% (benchmark 6.2%); investment results $134.4B
- Ten-year annualized: 7.2% (benchmark 6.9%); investment results $245.1B
- Since-inception (1965-2025): 8.2% annualized
The one-year gap to benchmark (-1.6%) is the smallest in the Canadian Big-Eight cohort for the most recent published year, narrower than CPP Investments’ -5.4% (fiscal 2026), OTPP’s -5.0% (calendar 2025), BCI’s -2.3% (fiscal 2025), and AIMCo’s -2.7% (calendar 2025).[Allocators Desk — Big-Eight snapshot] This relative performance is consistent with the higher infrastructure and public-market allocations that put a smaller share of the portfolio into the asset classes that struggled against benchmarks in 2025.
The five-year and ten-year value-add against benchmarks are positive (+0.3% per annum on each), which is a real but unspectacular long-horizon result, in line with the broad Canadian Big-Eight pattern.
Governance.
La Caisse is governed by a Board of Directors and an Executive Committee.[2] Its activities are framed by the Act respecting the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (R.S.Q. c. C-2),[2] the Code of Ethics for the Board, and a general Code of Ethics. La Caisse is subject to the Québec Act respecting Access to documents held by public bodies and the Protection of personal information (R.S.Q. c. A-2.1), which is the public-body transparency regime, and to the Regulation respecting the distribution of information and the protection of personal information.[2]
The Caisse’s proxy-voting posture is on the record: “We analyze each proposal submitted at the shareholder meetings of the companies we invest in, and we exercise our right to vote by proxy and publish them in a transparent manner.”[2] This is the same posture as the other Big-Eight Canadian managers; the distinguishing feature in La Caisse’s case is the publication discipline.
The Québec dimension.
The dual mandate (returns plus Québec economic development) makes the Québec-specific allocation a meaningful feature, not a marketing line. The performance page reports “$100.1 billion in total assets in Québec” and “$6.3 billion in new investments and commitments in Québec” as at December 31, 2025.[performance] The mid-market company offering and the Investments in Québec page surface the specific support for Québec-domiciled companies across growth stages.
For a cross-border buy-side reader, the practical implication is that La Caisse’s allocation choices will not collapse into the same framework as CPP Investments or OTPP. The Québec-economic-development arm is a constraint and an objective, not a soft preference; the published domestic numbers should be read alongside the performance numbers, not separately.
Offices and operating footprint.
La Caisse maintains offices in Montréal (business office at Édifice Jacques-Parizeau), Québec City (head office at Édifice Price), Toronto, New York City, London, Singapore, Mexico City, New Delhi, Paris, São Paulo, and Sydney.[1][4] The geographic footprint is genuinely global, with the head office sitting in Québec City for legal and statutory reasons and operational depth concentrated in Montréal.
What this column tracks from here on La Caisse.
Three watch items.
- The Generations Fund’s allocation posture. As a debt-repayment vehicle administered by the Ministère des Finances rather than a pension plan, the Generations Fund has a distinct investment horizon. How La Caisse handles allocation across the GF versus the longer-dated pension liabilities is a structural question worth marking when the 2025 Annual Report’s depositor-level detail is read.
- Infrastructure as a proportion of the portfolio. $75 billion in infrastructure is a substantial line. Whether La Caisse continues to tilt into infrastructure relative to peer cohort weights is the asset-class-level call to watch.
- The five-year and ten-year benchmark relationship. La Caisse is currently slightly ahead on both. A sustained outperformance versus peers on the same horizon would be a meaningful signal that the infrastructure-tilted mix is durably differentiated.
The next CDPQ-specific Manager Watch piece pulls the 2025 Annual Report PDF directly for the depositor-level breakdowns and the asset-class sub-aggregates that the snapshot page does not surface.
Comments and pointers to coverage worth folding in at [email protected].
Sources
- La Caisse / CDPQ, About La Caisse: Our foundation for lasting success. https://www.cdpq.com/en/about-us. Retrieved 2026-05-30; saved as
cdpq-about-us-2026-05-30.mdin the research library underpensions/2026/. - La Caisse / CDPQ, Governance at La Caisse. https://www.cdpq.com/en/about-us/governance. Retrieved 2026-05-30; saved as
cdpq-governance-2026-05-30.md. - La Caisse / CDPQ, Our depositors. https://www.cdpq.com/en/about-us/depositors. Retrieved 2026-05-30; saved as
cdpq-depositors-2026-05-30.md. - La Caisse / CDPQ, Snapshot of La Caisse, as at December 31, 2025. https://www.cdpq.com/en/about-us/snapshot. Retrieved 2026-05-30; saved as
cdpq-snapshot-2026-05-30.md. - La Caisse / CDPQ, Performance: Generating sustainable value, as at December 31, 2025. https://www.cdpq.com/en/performance. Retrieved 2026-05-29; saved as
cdpq-2025-performance-2026-05-29.md. - Act respecting the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, R.S.Q. c. C-2. https://www.legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/document/cs/C-2. Governing legislation, cited from La Caisse’s governance page.