3 days Ago By BNNBloomberg
The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System bought up stocks last week after Donald Trump’s tariff program pummeled global markets. “When the market dipped, we’ve loaded up on the greatest equities,” Chief Executive Officer Blake Hutcheson said at a Canadian Club event in Toronto on Tuesday. “We were really, really active last Monday at the bottom of the market,” he said.
Public equities made up 20 per cent of Omers’ total portfolio last year, the smallest it’s ever been, according to Hutcheson. He added that the Toronto-based pension fund decreased its equity book in anticipation of the “noise.” Hutcheson also criticized Trump’s approach to Canada.
“Tariffs are going to hit us — that’s all fair game,” he said. “I am mad at the insults. I am mad about the 51st state.
I am mad about the indignities toward those that don’t deserve it in our nation.” Governments in Canada are curbing their relationships with U.S.
businesses in reaction to the trade war, and Canadian consumers have been boycotting American products and cutting back on trips down south. Hutcheson said he was concerned about the impact of the trade war in terms of sustained periods of low growth and high inflation as businesses and consumers cut back on spending. “We see in our malls, we started to see in our hotels,” he said.
But Hutcheson isn’t “terribly worried” about the implications of tariffs on the Omers’s $138.2 billion (US$100 billion) portfolio. Out of the 30 large infrastructure companies the pension plan owns, only two are directly impacted by the cross-border levies, he said.
Layan Odeh, Bloomberg News ©2025 Bloomberg L.P..
