Chair – Harpinder Sandhu

BCIMC the company that oversees investments for B.C. public sector pension plans as well as other government funds issued a recent report.

A decision to shift investments into global stock markets paid off last year for BCIMC which earned a 14.2-per-cent return for the year and boosted its total assets to $124-billion.
BCIMC reported it moved more assets into global equities during the fiscal year ended March 31, 2015, while reducing its weighting in fixed income holdings and mortgages, responding to volatility in Canadian stock markets as oil prices declined.

The fund ended the fiscal year with 49.5 per cent of its assets invested in public stock markets, up from 47.6 per cent a year earlier. BCIMC had 21.5 per cent of its holdings in fixed-income securities such as bonds, down slightly from 22 per cent last year, while 14.6 per cent of the portfolio is in real estate, a decline from 17.4 per cent at the end of fiscal 2014.

The fund said its Canadian public equity holdings earned a 7.5-per-cent return last year, while global public equities earned a far higher 23 per cent and emerging markets equities posted 21.4-per-cent gains, illustrating the value of shifting out of Canada’s volatile stock market.

BCIMC said investing in passive benchmarks last year would have earned a 12.6-per-cent return, so its active investment strategy added $1.4-billion in additional returns. Over the past 10 years, BCIMC earned an average 8.1-per-cent annualized return, exceeding its benchmark of 7.3 per cent.

CUPE BC Pension Committee Appointment

Recently, I was appointed to serve on the CUPE BC Pension Committee. The term will be until the CUPE BC Convention in 2017.
M/S/C