This Week in Canadian Money: University of Guelph received a $51M donation

Plus: a new account from Scotiabank, La Caisse owns a little bit of everything, and more.

Jared

May 08, 2026

Hey, welcome back.

Here are 4 things that caught my eye this week in Canadian money:

1. Scotiabank launched a new savings account

It’s called the Scotia High Interest Savings Account (HISA).
How it works: the more you deposit and invest with the bank, the higher the interest rate you earn.

This account is interesting because typically, banks give bonuses tied to a balance amount or setting up direct deposits. E.g. you tend to see:

Balance: keep $5,000 in the account and the annual fee for your credit card will get waived.
Direct deposit: set up your bi-weekly/monthly paycheque to go to this account and earn an additional +1.5% in interest.

But this approach is different. It’s a blend of the two - the balance amount of the former and the improved interest rate of the latter.

I’m always interested in learning about different types of bank accounts and the incentives that banks provide (like lower fees, better rates, etc). You could say I have high interest in learning about this high interest account.

2. TD issued a CHF 150M green bond

That’s about $263M.

It’s the bank’s 7th sustainable bond
Their first in Switzerland/Europe
The bank has now issued over $5.2B in green bonds since 2014

Zooming out: you might remember that the bank issued another green bond about a month ago. That time it was in Canadian dollars ($1.5B).

I think it’s notable that they issued this one in Swiss francs - the appetite for green bonds seems higher in Europe, so they’re going to where demand is. Makes sense.

3. The University of Guelph received a $51M donation

The money is for the business school.
The donors are the Lang family
- In 2019, they donated $21M, which saw the College of Business and Economics renamed to the Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics.

The university said it’s the largest gift ever made to a Canadian business school. Though to be fair, it’s the largest by just a hair.

In 2015, the Queen’s business school was renamed to Smith because of an ever so smaller $50M donation. I went to Queen’s so I remember the news of the donation well. At the time I was [REDACTED] years old.1

As an aside, Queen’s had an amazing run in October 2015: a $50M donation on Oct 1 and then 5 days later Queen’s professor emeritus Arthur McDonald won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Will history repeat itself? Is this Guelph’s business school donation / Nobel Prize moment?

As for Canadian higher education philanthropy, here’s the current state if you’re curious and feeling generous:

Considering comparables and trends, the current market rate for business school donations has now inched up from $50M to $51M to where it now stands at $52M.2
Opportunities are narrowing: Ivey, Lang, Rotman, Sauder, Schulich, Smith… they’re all taken. Already named after donors.

From my scan of the market, the business school at the University of Alberta is one of the few remaining unnamed schools… It’s currently the Alberta School of Business but it could very well be yours. It’s got your name on it (literally!)

4. La Caisse published its 2025 annual report

La Caisse is the big Quebec pension fund.

Their 2025 report and accompanying document are fascinating to me - they list off what the fund owns, going:

Company-by-company
Property-by-property (with the exact address for each)

The value of investments are also included in some places. Take a look at the document here [opens a PDF].

It’s a big PDF (141 pages), so I’ve picked out some investments that I think you might find interesting, along with their page number in case you want to look yourselves:3

Public market investments

$4.4B in Nvidia (pg. 80)
$3.8B in Alphabet (Google) (pg. 35)
$2.6B in Dollarama (pg. 52)
$2B in CN Rail (pg. 43)

Private market investments

For private market, it doesn’t give exact numbers for the value of each investment. Instead it gives a range. E.g.:

A = $0 to $200M
B = $200M to $400M
etc.

But even the ranges are interesting.

La Caisse has stakes in several Andreessen Horowitz funds (the largest venture capital firm in the world by AUM), in the $0-$200M range:

There’s also investments in:

A24 Films ($0-$200M): The studio behind big movies such as Everything Everywhere All At Once, Lady Bird, Moonlight, and Uncut Gems.

pg. 106

Eurostar Group ($800M-$1B): The European train line, famously connecting London and Paris through the Chunnel.

pg. 117

Real estate

La Caisse also has real estate - both in Canada, of course, and also around the world: in NYC, Berlin, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney… the list goes on.

With how much La Caisse owns, it is basically a stock index in its own right. Plus, it has stakes in private companies, private funds, and plenty of real estate and infrastructure (and apparently a movie studio too - who knew!).

I encourage you to take a look at the PDF. It’s fun to go through.

By the way, it’s Mother’s Day this Sunday (don’t forget!). Once you’ve bought your mom flowers, treated her to brunch, and spent quality bonding time flipping through the La Caisse investments together, consider giving her the best gift of all: a free subscription to this lovely newsletter.

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