Cameron Burke

Other than a handful of Pension Plans domiciled in Quebec, the rest of the Canadian Pension Plan ecosystem has for the most part missed out on literally billions of $ of value creation generated by Canada’s innovative life sciences companies over the past five years. It doesn’t have to be so. Engaging Canada’s pension plans in Canada’s innovative life sciences ecosystem is not about charity or as some have suggested about “risking returns for pensioners”. It is about exactly the opposite. It is about providing alpha, enhancing returns, supporting high value domestic job creation, providing highly leveragable insights that can be used to enhance public market strategies, fulfilling ESG and impact objectives, and finally ensuring Canadians and not foreign investors derive a greater share of the value created from Canadian innovations and the hard work of Canadian entrepreneurs. I don’t know much, but that sounds like a highly virtuous circle, and as a Canadian who cares deeply about creating a vibrant economy for Canadians and seeing Canadian Pension Pensions prosper for pensioners, I, and am sure many of my peers, would be more than happy to help these Canadian Pension Plans learn how they could join that circle.

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The size of Canada combined with the geographic distribution of health conditions make the country ideal for multi-channel healthcare (e.g., Telehealth). Despite the significant demand for healthcare broadly, those business models haven't been able to achieve exponential growth or ideal unit economics just yet -- they've certainly grown and many are profitable, but millions of Canadians still lack primary care. It's a problem that's on the cusp of being solved (e.g., AI, integrated care) and could unlock significantly more access to care for Canadians. 

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The same is so in Australia. With strategic ecosystem focus and deploying a fraction of 1% of AUM, Australia’s superannuation industry could play a pivotal role in helping to transform Australia’s healthcare innovation ecosystem, and hold it accountable to global market standards and best-in-class process, achieving true patient impact.

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Compute is a major pillar for AI. Should countries breed their own champions or yield to US dominance? Earlier this summer, the Canadian Government launched a consultation to inform their strategy to invest $2B in compute for AI. Leah Elizabeth Morris and David Katz shared a great summary of Radical Ventures' position below ⬇ Key message that I fully agree with: "Subsidies should prioritize Canadian headquartered AI startups and scale-ups building and commercializing AI technologies rather than the suppliers (chipmakers, hyperscalers, data centre operators), enabling free market forces to further strengthen the Canadian AI ecosystem." See here: https://lnkd.in/gVizfQGx Having said that, I do believe there is an opportunity to support specialized Canadian hardware providers. Eric Flaningam recently shared the graphic below. Currently the hardware space is totally dominated by the US (80% ), but that space is still emerging and we do have potential champions here as well Untether AI D-Wave Tenstorrent WEKA #AI #Compute #Infra

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