The FT examines the empathy between Canada and British investment of pension schemes. In an article this morning with London’s Mary McDougall and Ilya Gridneff in Toronto

Like the UK, Canada has been examining how to channel more pension assets to domestic targets to combat weak productivity and poor business investment.

Last year more than 90 Canadian corporate executives signed an open letter calling on the government to amend rules which would allow them to increase domestic investments, saying the amount they allocated to Canadian equities had dwindled from 28 per cent in 2000 to 4 per cent by 2023.

Now Canada is calling on its C$3tn (US$2.1tn) pension system to boost domestic investment as it seeks C$500bn in new finance to reboot the economy and lower its dependence on the US.

The common factor with the UK is the drain that has become a handful of listed companies based on the West Coast of the USA which are as disturbing to savers as they are to economists and politicians. I have more invested in  Microsoft than I do in the UK. We can see how dominated the hold of these large players have on our lives. Yesterday for the second time in a few weeks we lost control of the digital services we rely on , for failures that emendated from abroad.

What worries people is that we are no longer independent of our neighbours either digitally or financially and that if we were (heaven forbid) to have a truly bad actor in the White House, we would not have commonality which we recently had with our European neighbours.

You can hear this concern in the words of Canadian politicians when they talk about dependence on  the United States, this is a step beyond where we are in the UK but it is quite possible it is a step we will find ourselves on.

(Canadian) Industry minister Mélanie Joly told the Financial Times the new wave of “economic nationalism” means Canada’s financial institutions must foster homegrown investments and major infrastructure projects to kick-start the country’s sluggish economy.

“I’ve had lots of conversations with our banks, and our pension funds. There’s a sentiment that we need to think about Canada first and that we need to put capital where our mouth is,”

she said.

This month Joly launched an industrial strategy aimed at creating jobs and attracting foreign investment in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada.

“For a long time pension funds have said that they need to provide yields to their beneficiaries . . . but they can have a discussion with their beneficiaries about their impact in their own country, their own environment, where beneficiaries live,” she said.

There is of course an additional consideration in the UK, that our pension systems may come under the control of American private markets about whom we have little control or restitution if things go wrong.

I think that many people getting paid by a financier lodged in Bermuda but based in the USA will not be comfortable when they find that out.

Meanwhile we have a Commonwealth tying us together with Canada and a pension system that aspires to the solidity of Canada’s Maple 7. As with Australia we have deep cultural and economic groups as well as cultural with all Commonwealth countries.

There is something about our own country, our own environment and the country that our forefathers lived in which exists in countries within the commonwealth and perhaps we should reconsider this going forward.