^ of course it shouldn't be considered general revenue, but the fact is that investment in infrastructure where CPP earns a return isn't general revenue. It's still going to cost the government money under this plan either through interest or not realizing revenues from tolls or other fees. Basically what is happening is that CPP is taking the place of the 'usual' private entity here. It's common for pension funds around the world to invest in infrastructure projects, and generally they like to own the assets so that they have full control. In some of these cases the asset doesn't mean a highway, it means the stream of interest payments from the building of the asset, just to be clear.
As far as peoples perceived risk, the unfortunate reality is that they have no idea what the risks are in the grand scheme. While I'm personally not big on investing into infrastructure projects, the attraction for a pension is that they are largely more predictable and less volatile than the stock market. They provide relatively steady streams of inflation-adjusted income. CPP and other pensions aren't aggressively managed at all, so as much as it sounds bad to say, just because some guy (not you) with rudimentary knowledge of capital markets thinks it's too risky or there are political issues potentially, is irrelevant. If the people running CPP and making investment decisions think it's a good idea based on their mandates then they should go ahead and invest.
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