Executive Profile · Researched and edited by the UAO editorial desk · Saturday, 5 September 2026
$303.2bn — Ontario Teachers' net assets at 30 June 2026, against a target of $300bn by 2030 · $200bn — the base he started from in January 2020 · 346,000 working and retired teachers · 9.2% — the annualised net return since 1990 · 6.8% — the ten-year return reported at the end of 2025, down from 9.8% six years earlier · 3 — consecutive years below benchmark, conceded in writing by his own board · US$95m — written to zero in FTX · $25.9bn — venture growth at mid-2026, from $10.4bn eighteen months earlier
The Number He Named
In February 2022, sitting for a Zoom interview with Report on Business magazine, the chief executive of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan explained what he had done to his own organisation on arrival. "I set the task for everybody when I started to increase the assets of the plan from $200 billion to $300 billion by 2030," Jo Taylor said. "To do that, we're creating about $150 billion of growth, so you're almost doubling the plan over that period. Which, frankly, is an interesting challenge."
It is a peculiar thing for the head of a defined-benefit pension plan to say out loud. Asset owners of this size generally do not publish growth targets. They publish funded status, a discount rate, a policy benchmark and a long-run return assumption, and they let the arithmetic of contributions and compounding take care of the rest. A number like $300 billion is not a fiduciary obligation. Nobody's pension depends on it. It is, in the strictest sense, a marketing device — a stake driven into the ground so that seven thousand kilometres of strategy can be tied to it.
Which is exactly why it is worth taking seriously. Taylor did not inherit a broken institution that needed a rallying cry. He inherited one of the most admired pension funds in the world: $191.1 billion at the end of 2018, fully funded, compounding at 9.7 per cent a year since its founding in 1990, with roughly 80 per cent of its money run in-house by its own people. Ontario Teachers' was the plan other plans were built to imitate. The obvious thing for a new chief executive to do with an institution like that is very little.
Taylor did the opposite. He named a number, attached a decade to it, and then added a condition that most of the coverage skipped over. "I was very deliberate around this $300-billion target," he told the same magazine. "I've set a growth mandate agenda for everybody, with a difficult exam question: How do you do it, whilst taking, in some cases, half the risk of our competitors? That's the skill."
On 10 August 2026 Ontario Teachers' reported net assets of $303.2 billion at 30 June. The target was met four and a half years early. Characteristically, the plan's own press release did not say so; the figure sits in the first paragraph and the ambition sits nowhere, and it is left to the reader to put the two together.
This profile is about what that number cost, what it concealed, and what a British private-equity man from the 3i school actually did to a Canadian teachers' pension plan over six and a half years — including the parts that did not work, which he has been unusually willing to say out loud.
Jonathan Jo
Almost nothing is publicly known about Jo Taylor before he was a grown man with a job, and what little exists arrived by way of a single aside in a Globe and Mail profile in June 2021. His name, David Milstead recorded in a parenthesis, "is a derivation of Jonathan, the name his mother gave him, subsequently tweaked on childhood playgrounds because of the A.A. Milne poem 'Jonathan Jo,' in which the titular character 'has a mouth like an "o."'"
That is the sum total of the published childhood: a mother, a playground, and a piece of light verse from When We Were Very Young. There is no reported birthplace, no school, no account of how a boy in Britain came to spend his life allocating other people's capital. Ontario Teachers' does not publish his date of birth and the UK statutory register cannot be made to yield it. When the Globe announced his appointment as chief executive in July 2019 and wanted to give readers an age, the best its reporter could manage was a hedge: "past news articles suggest Mr. Taylor turns 58 this year." That would put his birth somewhere around 1961. It is the closest thing to a fact of record, and it is a newspaper's guess.
The education is firmer, because Ontario Teachers' has stated it consistently for fourteen years. He took a BA with honours at London University and later an MBA at Manchester Business School — the same two lines appear in the plan's January 2012 hiring release and in its 2026 corporate biography, unchanged. The Globe, reading his LinkedIn profile in 2019, dated them: the London degree in 1982, the Manchester MBA in 1984. The subject of the first degree, the college within London University, the class of honours — none of it is anywhere. For a man who has run one of the largest pools of long-horizon capital on earth, the paper trail before 1984 is essentially blank.
What he did with those two degrees is the whole of the pre-Canadian career, and it happened at one address.
Twenty Years at 3i
"More than 20 years with 3i Group Plc, where he held a number of progressively senior roles and was a member of the group management and investment committees." That sentence, from Ontario Teachers' press release of 24 January 2012, is the most specific description of Jo Taylor's first career that any institution has ever published, and it was written by the employer that had just hired him.
3i matters to understanding him. It is not a Wall Street or Bay Street institution and it does not produce Wall Street or Bay Street people. Founded in 1945 by the Bank of England and the clearing banks to supply long-term capital to British industry, 3i spent decades as the most patient, most industrial, most unglamorous large investor in Europe — a firm whose business was owning operating companies for years and improving them, rather than trading them. It was, in effect, a permanent-capital vehicle before the phrase was fashionable, and it schooled two generations of British investors in the discipline of the long hold.
Taylor's one dated, named title inside that firm survives in a 3i investor presentation given in New York on 3 March 2006, where the senior-team slide reads: "Jo Taylor — Managing Partner, Venture Capital." He was, in the middle of the last decade, running the venture book of one of Europe's largest listed investors. He described the education himself, years later, on the Money Maze Podcast: his time at 3i, the show's own summary records, "educated him in venture capital and growth investing."
Hold that fact. A great deal of what happened at Ontario Teachers' between 2019 and 2026 — the venture platform that went from three per cent of the fund to nine, the willingness to underwrite SpaceX in 2019 and Anthropic in 2025, and, on the other side of the ledger, the willingness to underwrite FTX — is downstream of a man who spent his formative professional decades doing venture and growth capital in a firm that expected to hold things.
Beyond 3i and before Ontario Teachers', the record thins to a single clause. He worked, the 2012 release says, "as an independent investor, portfolio manager and board member." No firm is named. No dates are given. Two frequently repeated claims about this period — a stint at Nova Capital, and a Birmingham private-equity chapter — do not survive contact with the sources; neither appears in any document we could inspect, and the only Birmingham in the file is Birmingham International Airport, which was an Ontario Teachers' asset, not an employer. Both are omitted here.
The London Office
On 24 January 2012, Teachers' Private Capital announced it had hired a new head for its London office. The title was Vice-President of Teachers' Private Capital and the plan's senior representative for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The mandate, as written, was modest and precise: "lead a growing team of professionals responsible for sourcing, negotiating and executing investments ranging between C$100 million and C$300 million."
The institution he was joining was, at that point, a $107.5 billion Canadian pension plan with 295,000 members and a private-capital portfolio of about $12 billion — significant, but not yet the global machine it would become. Jane Rowe, then senior vice-president of Teachers' Private Capital and one of the most consequential figures in Canadian private equity, made the hire and explained it in terms that read, in retrospect, like a prediction: "With his extensive investment background and private equity experience, Jo has demonstrated a collaborative leadership style and strong deal-origination skills that will make him a powerful addition to our London team. His appointment enhances our investment capabilities and demonstrates our clear commitment to grow our European business."
He would run London for eight years, and in that time he did something that is easy to under-read from a Canadian vantage point: he became an owner of British infrastructure. Ontario Teachers' UK holdings in 2012 already exceeded £2 billion — Camelot, the operator of the National Lottery; High Speed 1; Bristol and Birmingham airports; Scotia Gas Networks; Thomas More Square. Taylor did not merely allocate to them. He sat on them. By December 2016 the plan's own release recorded that he was "Chair of Camelot and a non-executive director of SGN, Helly Hansen and Burton's Biscuits."
Read that list again. The chairman of the company that ran the British National Lottery — an institution woven into the weekly life of the country — was a Canadian pension fund executive. It is the single cleanest illustration available of what universal ownership actually means at ground level: a teachers' plan in Ontario, funded by contributions from people who teach mathematics in Sudbury and Thunder Bay, sitting in the chair at the top of the UK lottery. Taylor has told the story of what that felt like when it collided with the British state, and we will come to it.
He was direct about the advantage of his own foreignness once he got to Toronto, and it is worth setting down early because it explains a good deal of his management style. "I'm not Canadian, so I'm actually coming at it from a slightly different perspective," he told the Globe in 2021. "I hope that's actually helpful because I can be direct, honest and challenging within the organization. Sometimes you can feel hamstrung because you're part of the community. … I think we don't always say what we think. So I've pushed really hard for a bit more authenticity and directness on the communications side."
The Promotion Ladder
The ascent from London office head to chief executive took three steps and seven years, and each step was announced in its own press release, which makes the trajectory unusually legible.
On 1 December 2016, effective the following January, he became Senior Managing Director, International — a role created for him by Bjarne Graven Larsen, then chief investment officer. He kept EMEA, took oversight of the plan's presence in London and Hong Kong, joined the underwriting committees for every region, and became interim head of Asia Pacific when Nicole Musicco returned to Toronto to run public equities. For a period he was splitting his working life between London and Hong Kong while running a search for the person who would replace him in the latter. Graven Larsen's assessment of why: "Jo is uniquely qualified for this role. He has an innate understanding of relationship building and the global nature of today's investment environment. He has earned the respect of our partners around the world by delivering value, and is committed to building our global strategy and presence."
On 26 June 2018 the plan created another new role and gave him that too: Executive Managing Director, Global Development. It was announced in the same release that made Ziad Hindo chief investment officer, and the remit was almost comically abstract — he was "responsible for elevating the organization's global mindset." More concretely, he and Hindo were to "design and execute the pension plan's international investment strategy and presence." He reported to the chief executive, Ron Mock, and he moved to Toronto from London. (Ontario Teachers' own releases disagree about the date of this appointment: the contemporaneous announcement is 26 June 2018, "effective immediately," while the 2019 succession release states August 2018. We use the earlier, contemporaneous document.)
Anyone who has watched a large institution run a succession will recognise the shape of this. A newly created executive role, reporting directly to the incumbent chief executive, with a mandate broad enough to be about everything and specific enough to be about the one thing the board actually cares about, and a relocation to head office. Ontario Teachers' has since confirmed the timing without embarrassment: "a comprehensive succession review process began in 2018."
The Succession
On 9 July 2019 the plan announced that Jo Taylor would become President and Chief Executive Officer on 1 January 2020, succeeding Ron Mock, who was retiring at year-end after almost two decades with the organisation, the last six in the chief executive's chair.
The board's account of the process was pointed. "Good governance is a cornerstone of the organization and a comprehensive succession review process began in 2018," the release said. "The Board reviewed a broad and diverse set of candidates, both from within the organization and externally, and determined that the organization has an incredibly strong pipeline of internal talent." That last clause is the kind of sentence boards write when they wish to say, without saying it, that they had options.
Steve McGirr, the board chair, set out the reasoning: "We selected Jo because he will be an excellent driver of the Ontario Teachers' brand, and for his ability to advance the organization's global effectiveness and build for the future. We believe that Jo will enhance the total-fund approach, address the challenges of today's investment environment, and uphold the tradition of successfully delivering on the pension promise for our members. He is also known for building high-performing, multicultural teams globally."
Note the first item on that list. Not returns. Not risk. The brand. It is an unusual thing for a pension board to put first, and it turned out to be an accurate forecast of what its new chief executive would spend the next six years doing.
Ron Mock, whose plan it had been, was warmer than the form requires. "The Board has made an excellent choice in appointing Jo, and I am confident that under his poised and steady leadership the organization and its members will be in good hands," he said in the release. "His extensive global investing experience over the last 35 years, his strategic vision, and his passion for the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and its success make Jo an excellent choice." Speaking to the Globe the same day, Mock was blunter about the logic: "Jo's appointment really is an acknowledgement that for a plan the size of ours to deliver on its mission, international investing is critical. And Jo has done that all of his life, coming out of the world of private equity, being in charge of our international operations. He was an obvious strong candidate out of a long list of candidates that we had."
And then Mock said the thing that pension chief executives rarely say about their successors, which is why it has survived. Taylor, he told the paper, "knows investing, and he's lived through many cycles of investing. We're not predicting any market issues at this point in time, but sometime going forward, it's nice to have somebody who's lived through some rough cycles at the helm, and Jo definitely covers that box. And besides, he's just one hell of an amazing person."
Taylor's own words on the day were more restrained, and worth quoting in full because they set the frame for everything after: "I am honoured by the Board's confidence in appointing me as the new CEO, and look forward to the challenge of furthering our global competitiveness, and ensuring the best possible results for our members, employees, plan sponsors and investment partners. As a direct result of Ron's strategic vision and leadership, Ontario Teachers' is well positioned for the future."
Six months later he had the job, and eleven weeks after that the world closed.
What He Inherited
It is important to be exact about the institution Taylor took over, because the story of his tenure is in large part the story of how a very good starting position was spent.
At 31 December 2018 Ontario Teachers' held net assets of $191.1 billion, up $50.3 billion in five years from $140.8 billion. The five-year annualised net return was 8 per cent, and the plan had added $14.2 billion of cumulative value above its policy benchmark over that period — 1.5 percentage points a year of genuine, measured alpha. Since its founding in 1990 it had compounded at 9.7 per cent a year net. It served 327,000 working and retired teachers. Roughly 80 per cent of the money was managed internally, by salaried employees in Toronto, London and Hong Kong, rather than farmed out to fee-taking managers. It had been fully funded for six consecutive years.
By the time the 2019 numbers were published — earned under Mock, announced by Taylor — net assets stood at $207.4 billion after a 10.4 per cent year and $20.2 billion of investment income, the most in the plan's history. The ten-year annualised return reported at that moment was 9.8 per cent.
Remember that figure. Ten-year returns move slowly, which is what makes them the honest measure of a long-horizon investor, and 9.8 per cent is a superb one. At the end of 2025, on the same measure, Ontario Teachers' reported 6.8 per cent. That three-percentage-point erosion over six years is the most under-discussed number in this entire file, and no account of Jo Taylor's tenure that ignores it is worth reading. It is also, as we shall see, considerably more complicated than a simple verdict on his stewardship — much of it is the arithmetic of very good years from 2009 to 2015 rolling out of the window. But it is the number a fiduciary has to look at.
The Year Everything Moved
Taylor's first year in the chief executive's chair was 2020. He had arrived in Toronto from London barely eighteen months earlier, into a city where he knew almost nobody, and the pandemic removed what remained of the opportunity. "It's been a lot harder to connect with the Toronto community, meet people and build friendships in a pandemic where everything's locked down," he said in 2022. "At some point we'll get through this, which hopefully will allow me to make those relationships."
Professionally, 2020 produced the single most aggressive piece of portfolio surgery of his tenure, and he described it later in terms that would make a conventional pension trustee blink.
"Many say we behave more like a hedge fund than a traditional pension plan because we move capital between our different asset classes very deliberately and quite significantly," he told the audience at the Financial Times Future of Asset Management North America Summit in New York. "For instance, at the outset of 2020, nearly 50% of our balance sheet was in fixed income, but by the end of the year, it stood at zero. We reallocated the best part of $120 billion into other asset classes."
The published asset mix bears out the direction, if not quite the drama of the phrasing: total fixed income fell from $93.1 billion — 46 per cent of net investments — at the end of 2019 to $34.6 billion, or 16 per cent, at the end of 2020, with the plan's money-market position swinging from minus $79.1 billion to minus $18.3 billion as leverage was unwound. Whatever label one puts on it, an institution of that size does not move a hundred billion dollars in a calendar year by accident, and it does not do it without a chief executive who wants it done.
The plan returned 8.6 per cent that year and finished at $221.2 billion, fully funded for an eighth consecutive year with a surplus of $8.5 billion and a funding ratio of 103 per cent. Taylor's public verdict was appropriately institutional — "our portfolio proved to be very resilient during a turbulent year" — but the sentence underneath it was the one that mattered: "Our ability to navigate the many challenges posed in 2020 was anchored around the skill, agility and application of our team."
Agility became the word. It recurs in almost every subsequent Taylor communication, and it is the concept on which the entire strategic edifice rests: that a plan of this scale, with a funding position strong enough to permit choice, ought to be able to move.
Bolder and Bigger
In June 2021, in what the Globe and Mail described as his first lengthy Canadian interview, Taylor made the case for shaking a very successful institution.
"Teachers has had a history of being quite ballsy, right, at times," he said. "Look at when it bought [real estate company] Cadillac Fairview. That's a pretty brave bet, but it did it many years ago. And the returns we made from Cadillac Fairview have been great over a long period of time." Then the pivot: "And my job, I think, is to say, well, what's next for Teachers? And I do see that as really trying to make sure it's a great international investing institution. But also I think it's bringing some entrepreneurial spirit back into the business, because we need that to be able to pivot to find the right places to invest and also make sure we've got the risk culture to actually try things out."
Two words in that passage deserve underlining: back, and risk culture. Taylor's diagnosis of Ontario Teachers' in 2020 was not that it lacked talent or scale but that it had become careful — that an institution built on a series of famously bold bets in the 1990s and 2000s had, in maturity, stopped placing them. His prescription was to place more, and to accept publicly that some would fail.
David Milstead's characterisation of the man making the argument has stuck to him: "In a way, Mr. Taylor is an outsider insider, an internal successor who's spent little time on Bay Street." Trevor Cole, writing the ROB Magazine profile nine months later, put it more colourfully: "In 2020, Jo Taylor made everyone aware that someone new was in charge at Teachers when, after taking over from Ron Mock, he announced he wanted the plan to make 'bolder and bigger' investments. The U.K.-born Taylor, who had run the plan's London office for eight years, then said he wanted Teachers to be more 'entrepreneurial' and started talking about its 'brand.' The plan hasn't been this interesting since it sold its stake in the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2011."
What is easy to miss, and what separates Taylor from the generic growth-minded chief executive, is that the boldness was always explicitly paired with a constraint. "The amount of risk we take will be less than some of our peers because of our funding dynamic," he told the same paper in 2021. "So we'll have a different allocation to say, equities, than perhaps some of our Maple Eight counterparts. And that's deliberate. … Our ability to recover from bad years is going to be more challenging than perhaps some others. We try to be really thoughtful about the return we make on risk." He put it more starkly in 2022: "In a plan with our funding dynamic, if you have a really bad year, it's quite hard to recover."
This is the genuine intellectual content of the Taylor era, and universal owners should sit with it. Ontario Teachers' is a mature plan: 346,000 members, with the retired population large enough that benefits paid ($8.5 billion in 2025) exceed contributions received ($4.1 billion) by a wide margin. A plan in that condition cannot take a 25 per cent drawdown and wait a decade for it to heal, because it is spending capital while it waits. Taylor's answer was not to reduce ambition but to reroute it: grow the fund by finding return in more places, at lower aggregate risk, rather than by leaning harder on equity beta. Whether the strategy delivered is a question we take up below, and the answer is genuinely mixed.
Fifty Countries to Nine
The most consequential structural decision of Taylor's tenure was almost certainly the least reported: he narrowed the map.
"The best way is to employ local investors, because they understand that market better than I might from here," he explained in 2022. "Historically, we've invested in about 50 countries. We've baked that down to nine, to have that very clear, locally based strategic focus on how we win in those markets. The key considerations for me are: Is the government predictable and stable? What's our view of the economy? What's our view of regulation, and is it predictable? And the last one, which is also super important, is, What's the currency doing?"
Fifty to nine. For a universal owner, that is close to a philosophical statement — an admission that the diversification benefit of the fiftieth country is smaller than the governance cost of underwriting it from six thousand miles away. It also explains the office strategy, which otherwise looks like empire-building. If the model is local people in chosen markets, then offices are not overhead; they are the model.
The build-out under Taylor was rapid. Hong Kong had opened in 2013, the plan's first in Asia. Singapore followed on 28 September 2020 — nine months into his tenure — covering India, Australia and New Zealand, and ASEAN, while Hong Kong retained Greater China, South Korea and Japan; at the time the plan had "more than 30 employees and approximately $15 billion invested" across Asia-Pacific. San Francisco was announced in April 2022 alongside the rebranding of the venture platform. Mumbai opened on 27 September 2022 as the sixth global office and the third in Asia-Pacific, with about ten people in the Bandra Kurla Complex under Deepak Dara as head of India.
Taylor's rationale for India was as plain a statement of long-horizon logic as he has given: "India is an attractive investment destination and will be one of our growth markets over the next 5-10 years. It has a large, growing, and dynamic economy, with openness to foreign capital which makes it a strategically important market for us."
By the end of 2025 the geography of the plan looked like this: the Americas — Toronto, San Francisco, New York and Dallas — holding over $230 billion; EMEA, run from London, over $56 billion; Asia-Pacific, now Singapore and Mumbai only, $26 billion across some fifty-five people.
Singapore and Mumbai only. That absence is the subject of one of the harder passages in this profile, and we come to it below.
Teachers' Venture Growth
If the $300 billion target is the headline of the Taylor era, the venture platform is its most consequential single decision — the place where the 3i education and the "entrepreneurial spirit" argument met a balance sheet.
The vehicle predates him. Teachers' Innovation Platform was established in 2019, and its first investment, in June of that year, was SpaceX. But it was Taylor who supersized it. On 19 April 2022 the platform was renamed Teachers' Venture Growth and given a target that few pension funds would put in writing: a plan "that will more than double the size of its portfolio to comprise seven to 10 per cent of Ontario Teachers' net assets over the next five to ten years, up from approximately three per cent today," together with twelve new hires and the San Francisco office. The portfolio then stood at C$7.1 billion across twenty direct investments, with names including ApplyBoard, Epic Games, ComplyAdvantage, Kry, Tanium and Pony.ai.
Taylor's argument for it was partly financial and partly, candidly, about identity. "I've lived in the venture world for a bit of my life and I think the question you keep coming back to is how disruptive and how large can the company become," he said in 2021, "because often with these businesses, if they can really deliver on their potential, your entry price becomes pretty irrelevant quite quickly because it grows at an exponential scale relative to others." He was not naive about the entry price either: "That's not to be glib about valuations which are high – let's just be honest, they are very high at the moment – but I think if you want to play in that space, you've got to be willing to bite the bullet on businesses you really have high conviction around and invest regularly."
On SpaceX specifically, and on the accusation that a teachers' pension plan had bought a headline, he was disarming: "There's value and there's issues with SpaceX. Some people have exactly the same reaction—is this just a publicity stunt rather than a real investment? Which it wasn't, just to say it. But it is a known business. We say we want to back disruptive companies that are in our innovation platform. When you mention SpaceX, everybody gets it." And on the platform as a whole: "It's good for our brand. It shows we're innovative. We buy businesses that are making a difference, that are disruptive, and that adds some lustre to our other activities."
The brand argument is not one most fiduciaries would make out loud. It is, however, honest — and for an institution competing for investment talent against private equity firms that pay multiples of a pension salary, not obviously wrong.
The numbers eventually vindicated the bet, spectacularly and suddenly. Venture growth stood at $10.4 billion, four per cent of net investments, at the end of 2024. A year later it was $15.3 billion and six per cent, after a 30.2 per cent return against an 18.5 per cent benchmark — the single best-performing asset class in the plan in 2025. At 30 June 2026 it was $25.9 billion and nine per cent, following SpaceX's NASDAQ listing, which Ontario Teachers' described as "a significant milestone for the first investment made by Teachers' Venture Growth" and "a significant contributor to Ontario Teachers' total-fund net return in the first half of the year."
The 2022 ambition — seven to ten per cent of the fund within five to ten years — was therefore reached in four, at the top of the range. It is the cleanest strategic win of Taylor's tenure.
It is also the source of his largest and most public loss, and he has never separated the two.
The List of Names
Before the loss, the record deserves its due, because the deal flow under Taylor was not the cautious drift of a plan playing out its string.
In 2022 the plan added roughly $3 billion of green assets — SSEN Transmission, Corio Generation, NextEra Energy, Haddington Ventures' ACES Delta — and the venture team led a US$220 million Series D for the German tax platform Taxfix and a €183 million Series E for the French health insurer Alan. In 2023 it took a co-control position in Compass Datacenters, bought a significant majority of Lincoln Property Company's residential division and rebranded it Willow Bridge, took a quarter of Sweetwater Royalties and a majority of Australia's GreenCollar, and backed Databricks and India's Xpressbees. In 2024 it merged its Fairstone Bank of Canada with Home Trust, led a $95 million round for the German battery firm Instagrid, co-led a $140 million round for Japan's SmartHR, and agreed to co-acquire the Nordic advisory firm Max Matthiessen.
2025 was the year of both the boldest new positions and the largest realisations. On the buy side: Anthropic's Series F, the Indian HR software firm Darwinbox, the Spanish dental platform Donte Group, Grafana Labs, Quantexa, a fourth investment into India's National Highways Infrastructure Trust, a lead in StackAdapt's round, and prime logistics in Sweden and Denmark. In his own annual-report letter Taylor listed the year's additions with characteristic understatement: "Additions included Anthropic, the company behind the AI-model Claude, and Donte Group, a leading dental care platform in Spain."
On the sell side, 2025 was extraordinary. Ontario Teachers' agreed to sell Amica Senior Lifestyles to Welltower for C$4.6 billion — a platform it had first backed in 2010 and taken private in 2015. It sold Sahyadri Hospitals in India to Manipal, sold the Diot-Siaci stake to Ardian, sold the majority of the Sydney Desalination Plant, restructured its BroadStreet insurance position, and sold its remaining interest in future cash flow from New Gold's New Afton mine.
And it left the airport business entirely. In roughly three months the plan exited Copenhagen, Brussels, London City, Bristol and Birmingham — ending some twenty-five years as one of the world's most significant private owners of airports. Financial terms were disclosed for none of them. It is a striking piece of portfolio management to execute quietly, and it happened in the same period in which Ottawa's Poloz working group was publicly encouraging Canadian pension funds to invest more in domestic infrastructure, airport facilities explicitly among them. No published source draws that line; we note it here as an observation, not a finding.
In the first half of 2026 the plan led or co-led rounds for Ramp and a secondary in Vinted, financed Kraken's spin-out from Octopus Energy, entered a new US real estate joint venture with Equus Capital Partners, bought a critical-minerals royalty portfolio in Western Australia covering lithium, tin and tantalum, and — after period end — agreed to sell 40 per cent of Caruna, Finland's largest electricity distributor.
That is not a portfolio being defended. It is a portfolio being actively turned over, in both directions, at scale. Whatever else the benchmark tables say, the transaction record of the Taylor era is the record of an institution doing things.
US$95 Million
In October 2021 Ontario Teachers' invested US$75 million in FTX International and its American entity. In January 2022 it added a further US$20 million to FTX.US. Both investments were made through Teachers' Venture Growth. They bought 0.4 per cent of FTX International and 0.5 per cent of FTX.US, and together they amounted to less than 0.05 per cent of the plan's total net assets.
On 17 November 2022, nine days after FTX filed for bankruptcy, the plan published a statement. It is the most important document of Taylor's tenure, and it should be read in the original rather than in summary, because what it does and does not say is instructive. It is an institutional statement, written in the first person plural and not attributed to Taylor or to anyone else by name.
It began by setting out the facts and the size. It then explained what the venture platform was for: "TVG was established in 2019 to invest in emerging technology companies raising late-stage venture and growth capital. Investments are structured to provide Ontario Teachers' with returns commensurate with the risk undertaken and to provide proprietary insights that inform investing elsewhere across the Plan. Naturally, not all of the investments in this early-stage asset class perform to expectations, however, since inception, TVG has delivered solidly on intended objectives."
It described the diligence in detail — third-party advisers, commercial, regulatory, tax, technical review — and then made the concession on which everything turns: "Recognizing that no due diligence process can uncover all risks especially in the context of an emerging technology business, the investment in FTX was sized moderately in relation to TVG and the overall portfolio of the Plan."
And it closed: "We will be writing down our investment in FTX to zero at our year end. The financial loss from this investment will have limited impact on the Plan, given its size relative to our total net assets and our strong financial position. However, we are disappointed with the outcome of this investment, take all losses seriously and will use this experience to further strengthen our approach."
Taylor gave his own account five months later, to the Financial Post, in April 2023, and it is more human than the institutional text: "FTX was a learning experience for us. We wanted to look at crypto. We chose an exchange (because) we thought it was a business of scale that would allow us to look and learn. It didn't turn out as we hoped. We're still processing some of the learning from that and until we have done, I think we're probably unlikely to do anything new."
Several things about the handling of FTX deserve credit, and one deserves scrutiny.
To the credit: the plan disclosed voluntarily and quickly, gave the exact numbers rather than a range, wrote the position to zero immediately rather than carrying it at a nominal value into the next reporting cycle, and did not attempt to distribute blame to its co-investors, its advisers or the market. Very few institutions that lost money in FTX did all four. And the sizing discipline held: US$95 million against a fund of $247 billion is precisely the kind of loss a venture programme is designed to be able to absorb without a fiduciary crisis. The system, in the narrow sense, worked.
To the scrutiny: the loss was not costless in reputation, and Ontario Teachers' members said so in court.
The Class Action, and What Was Conceded
In January 2025 a proposed class action was filed in the Ontario Superior Court on behalf of the plan's roughly 340,000 members, seeking the full US$95 million and alleging breach of fiduciary duty under the Pension Benefits Act. It is an unusual and uncomfortable thing for a pension fund to be sued by its own beneficiaries, and the allegations were specific.
"The Board failed to obtain adequate and reliable information about the FTX Entities' internal controls in the critical areas of management and governance, finance and accounting, as well as digital asset management, information security and cybersecurity," the claim said. It went on: "The Board also ignored, or otherwise failed to recognize and appropriately investigate and consider, red flags in respect of those internal controls." And it argued that the Canadian context raised the bar — that the collapse of the Quadriga exchange, the Ontario Securities Commission's report on it, and the regulatory response that followed "constituted special circumstances that raised the level of due diligence required of the Board."
Ontario Teachers' response was short: "We believe that the claim is without merit and intend to defend ourselves."
The case was discontinued, reported on 5 January 2026, settled before it reached certification. The terms are the creditable resolution, and they are more substantial than a quiet withdrawal. Ontario Teachers' agreed to pay the plaintiff's legal costs of more than $650,000; to publish a statement in its 2025 annual report addressing the outcome, the due-diligence process, and the policy changes made since, and confirming that no member contribution or benefit changed as a result of the write-down; and to publish, during 2026, the enhancements it plans to make to its processes — specifically around founder-managed companies.
That last item is the tell, and it is the right lesson. FTX was not primarily a crypto failure or a valuation failure. It was a governance failure at a company controlled by a founder with no meaningful board, no separation between the operating business and an affiliated trading firm, and no auditable internal control environment. A minority investor with a 0.4 per cent stake had no seat, no veto and no visibility. The correction Ontario Teachers' committed to publish is a correction about founder control, which is the actual variable, and it is more useful to the rest of the industry than another paragraph about digital assets.
Two further points of record. Discovery established that the plan carried no insurance against the loss. And there is no evidence, in either direction, about whether Ontario Teachers' recovered anything from the FTX estate: the FTX Recovery Trust began distributing more than US$5 billion to approved creditors from 30 May 2025, at recoveries reported between 54 and 120 per cent of claim, but Ontario Teachers' was an equity holder rather than a customer-creditor, and equity sits last in a bankruptcy waterfall. We do not assert a recovery and we do not assert there was none.
Taylor's own framing of the episode, offered before the litigation was filed and never revised afterwards, has aged well: a learning experience, processed slowly, with nothing new attempted until the processing was done. What he did not do — and this is the part that distinguishes him — is retreat from the platform that produced the loss. Teachers' Venture Growth went from three per cent of the fund to nine in the four years after FTX. A chief executive optimising for the absence of embarrassment would have shrunk it.
Three Years Below Benchmark
Here is the case against.
In 2023 Ontario Teachers' returned 1.9 per cent against a benchmark of 8.7 per cent — a shortfall of $15.8 billion. In 2024 it returned 9.4 per cent against 12.9 per cent, a shortfall of $7.6 billion. In 2025 it returned 6.7 per cent against 11.7 per cent, a shortfall of $12.0 billion. Three consecutive years, roughly $35 billion of cumulative value subtracted against the policy portfolio the plan itself designed.
The board has conceded it in writing, twice, in language that is unusually plain for an annual report. The 2024 report: "Our performance relative to our benchmarks has suffered for a second year." The 2025 report: "Our performance has trailed benchmarks for 3 consecutive years."
Over longer horizons, as reported in the 2025 annual report: five-year returns of 6.6 per cent against a benchmark of 8.8; ten-year of 6.8 against 7.9. Only the since-inception figure remains ahead — 9.2 per cent against 8.0, a genuine 1.2 points a year of value added across thirty-five years, most of it earned before 2019.
Taylor has not hidden from any of this, which is the strongest thing that can be said for his public conduct. On 2023: "While we advanced key strategic areas of focus in 2023, we did not generate investment results to desired levels. This was largely due to positioning the portfolio for a more challenging economic environment than ultimately transpired, our relatively lower exposure to public equities, and valuation adjustments in certain real estate and infrastructure assets." Then, to the Globe, without the press-release scaffolding: "Those returns really aren't the returns that we want on a long-term basis. And we strive to do better for our members." And: "Let me be honest with you: When you have a year when you're less happy with it, you probably up your focus on, how do you drive performance? And that is certainly what we're doing in 2024."
The most self-critical line in the entire public record is in his own annual-report letter for 2025: "That said, our net return trailed our benchmark. Our active programs are designed to consistently deliver excess returns, but this was not the case in 2025. This will be a key focus for improvement in 2026."
There is a defence, and it is a real one rather than a public-relations one. The plan's benchmark is a policy portfolio heavy in public markets, and 2023 through 2025 was a period in which public equity indices, concentrated in a handful of very large American technology companies, ran far ahead of essentially every other asset. An institution that deliberately holds less equity beta than its peers, for the funding reasons Taylor set out in 2021, will lose to that benchmark in exactly those years — and will win in the years when the benchmark falls. The plan pointed out, correctly, that in the same window it remained fully funded every single year, with the surplus rising from $17.5 billion at the start of 2023 to $31.2 billion at the start of 2026, and a funding ratio of 111 per cent. It also cited CEM Benchmarking's assessment placing it in the hundredth percentile for risk-adjusted returns over the ten years to December 2022 against eighteen size-comparable global peers, with a Sharpe ratio of 2.01 against a peer median of 0.80.
Taylor's own most candid articulation of the tension came in a long-form interview in March 2025: "We have a big private equity portfolio therefore any benchmark upon it is going to be a question. … I guess the question for us is yes we want to beat our benchmarks in all the asset classes we have but we are a long-term investor looking for 7% nominally every year, and if Private Equity comes in with 12-14%, that isn't terrible either." (That exchange survives in a transcription by the pension blogger Leo Kolivakis rather than in an edited wire report, and is quoted here with that provenance stated.)
It is a fair argument. It is also the argument every underperforming active manager makes, and the discipline of a benchmark is precisely that it does not care whether the argument is fair. Three years is not noise. On the plan's own scoreboard, the Taylor era has so far been a period of very large absolute growth accompanied by persistent relative underperformance — and the honest reading is that both halves of that sentence are true at once.
The Building Problem
The clearest single source of the shortfall is real estate, and it has been going wrong for four straight years: minus 3.5 per cent against a 6.7 benchmark in 2022; minus 5.9 against 2.0 in 2023; minus 0.7 against 5.0 in 2024; minus 3.1 against 2.2 in 2025. Over the five years to December 2024 the plan's real estate returned minus 4.4 per cent a year against a positive 3.4 per cent benchmark.
The diagnosis, in the plan's own analysis of 2024, was concentration: the return was "largely attributable to the overconcentration of the portfolio in sectors with weaker relative performance, particularly office." The 2025 damage had a specific Canadian cause — the insolvency of Hudson's Bay Company hollowed out anchor space in fifteen of the malls the plan owns through Cadillac Fairview.
Taylor was early and blunt about the sector. "The prognosis for real estate, to me, remains pretty challenging," he told the Globe in March 2024. On the mechanics of a frozen market, in 2023: "There have been so few transactions for comparables for a while now. I don't think that'll last forever, but for now there have been few transactions happening, certainly (few) disposals happening." And on the plan's own posture: "I would say the model we operate in real estate is with low levels of borrowing" — which, in a cycle that destroyed leveraged office owners, was the correct place to be.
The structural response was significant and is, in our reading, the most under-appreciated governance decision of his tenure. On 12 June 2023 Ontario Teachers' announced it would establish an in-house real estate asset class group and absorb Cadillac Fairview's global team of thirty-seven real estate investment professionals directly into the plan, with a search for a Global Head of Real Estate. Cadillac Fairview — which the plan has owned since 2000, and which Taylor cites as the archetype of the institution's historic boldness — would henceforth "focus on growth, diversification, and densification of its unmatched real estate portfolio in Canada," while Ontario Teachers' took the global mandate. John Sullivan, Cadillac Fairview's president and chief executive for thirteen years, announced his retirement in the same release; Salvatore Iacono succeeded him.
What this did, in substance, was end the arrangement under which a wholly owned Canadian shopping-centre operator was also the plan's global real estate investor. It is the right structure. It has not yet produced the right numbers, and the leadership record since is uncomfortable: Pierre Cherki, hired from DWS and appointed executive managing director for real estate in January 2024 expressly to run the new model, departed less than two years later. Jenny Hammarlund — who had joined Cadillac Fairview in 2021 and moved across in the 2024 absorption — succeeded him from London in January 2026.
Meanwhile the disposal programme has been visibly hard. Cadillac Fairview listed Calgary's Encor Place, 359,131 square feet and only 40 per cent leased, at $21.5 million — about $60 a square foot. Iacono's explanation was unsentimental: "There are a couple of assets that we've put up for sale in Calgary… there's no longer adequate growth in those two assets from our perspective." Vancouver's Pender Place sold to KingSett for $125 million in August 2025, against a BC Assessment value of $146.2 million. The geographic mix has moved a long way — the real estate portfolio is now around 56 per cent Canadian, down from roughly 85 per cent before the pandemic — but the sector concentration that caused the damage was largely inherited, and unwinding it in a market with no bid is slow, expensive work.
The First Loss in Sixteen Years
2025 delivered a second, sharper blow, and this one landed in the book that had made Ontario Teachers' famous.
Private equity returned minus 5.3 per cent against a benchmark of 18.0 — a 23-point miss in the plan's largest active allocation, and, as reported at the time, its first private-equity loss in sixteen years. The position has been shrinking with it: $60.4 billion and 23 per cent of net investments at the end of 2024, $50.8 billion and 19 per cent a year later, $48.0 billion and 16 per cent at 30 June 2026.
Taylor's public account was disciplined and did not reach for excuses: "Our 2025 results reflect the resilience of our diversified portfolio and the disciplined approach we take to managing the plan on behalf of our members. We remain fully funded and delivered a one-year net return of 6.7%, supported by strong performance from gold and our venture growth and public equities asset classes. Our private equity and real estate teams had a more challenging year given broad sector headwinds. We responded with disciplined year-end valuation adjustments to reflect current market conditions, which weighed on performance."
Read that carefully. "Disciplined year-end valuation adjustments" is a plan marking its own private book down, deliberately, in a year it already knew would look bad. That is the opposite of the behaviour private-market critics allege — and it is consistent with something Taylor has argued since 2023: "The best test of your carrying value for private assets is actually when you sell them — that you can sell assets at a 15 to 20 per cent premium to carrying value. If you're not able to do that and you're selling your assets broadly at carrying value, where is the good news outcome?"
That is as clean a statement of honest private-market accounting as any large allocator has offered publicly, and Ontario Teachers' has been willing to test itself against it — the Amica sale at C$4.6 billion, the airport exits, the Diot-Siaci and Sahyadri disposals. Taylor has also been open that the value-creation lever has been stiffer than expected: squeezing more out of portfolio companies, he conceded to the Globe in 2026, has proved "a little harder than you imagine," and "the headwinds we're facing aren't that different from many of our peers."
On the wider question of whether the whole private-markets thesis has run its course, he gave the most complete answer of his tenure in March 2026: "I'd say that Ontario Teachers' over 35 years made a lot of money out of private equity. Point 1. Point 2 is when you've made a lot of money in a certain area, you want to move away from that with some thought and trepidation."
The portfolio is nonetheless moving. Public equity has gone from 14 per cent of net investments at the end of 2024 to 21 per cent at mid-2026, while private equity fell from 23 to 16. Fixed income, having been rebuilt after the 2020 purge, has been cut again — from 30 per cent to 21. It is a substantially different fund from the one he took over, and it is being rebuilt in public.
Hong Kong
The hardest passage of the Taylor era to write about generously is the retreat from Greater China, because of how it was disclosed.
The sequence is clear enough. In January 2023 Ontario Teachers' paused new direct investments in private assets in China, where it then held roughly 2 per cent of the portfolio, some C$5 billion. In April 2023 it closed its Hong Kong-based China and Asia public equities team, five jobs, and centralised stock-picking in Toronto — while saying that "Asia continues to be core to our global investment strategy, including China where our focus is on building value in our existing portfolio." In June 2024 it laid off four venture dealmakers in Hong Kong and refocused the platform on India, telling Reuters that "this decision is related only to our venture growth team in Hong Kong. We have (about) 25 team members based in Hong Kong and intend to maintain a presence there moving forward."
Nine months later the office was gone.
The closure was announced on 20 March 2025 — not in a press release of its own, but as a bullet inside the annual results statement: "Following year-end, we made the decision to optimize our Asia-Pacific office footprint with a focus on our Singapore and Mumbai locations. As a result, we have made the decision to close our Hong Kong office. We established this office in 2013 as our first in the region and have since opened additional regional offices in Singapore and Mumbai, where we have teams working across asset classes and markets. We believe activities currently undertaken in Hong Kong can be effectively and efficiently served out of Singapore going forward."
A spokesman, Dan Madge, filled in what the bullet did not: an eighteen-month-plus wind-down, some Hong Kong staff offered transfers to Singapore, "others will leave the organisation and we're working to support each of them." Headcount at closure was around twenty, down from thirty-five in September 2022. Asked directly whether geopolitics was the reason, the plan declined to comment. In November 2025 it went further, disbanding its Singapore-based Asia real estate team and moving oversight to Toronto.
Taylor's only substantive public comment on the geopolitics is characteristically economical: "Geopolitically, life's got more complicated. So we're trying to work out how we use that network of great people around the world as best we can." (This quotation reaches us through a secondary transcription of a paywalled interview; we flag the provenance.) He has been more expansive about the underlying difficulty of the position: "It's harder to be an international investor, because people are thinking much more locally these days. It's hard to be an active investor in China and the U.S., because those two countries are going in quite different directions, politically."
Two judgements. The strategic one is defensible, arguably correct, and consistent with the fifty-to-nine doctrine: an investor who has decided it cannot underwrite Chinese political risk should not maintain an office pretending otherwise, and Singapore and Mumbai are where the plan's Asian money now is. The disclosure judgement is harder to defend. A commitment made in public in June 2024 — "intend to maintain a presence there moving forward" — was reversed in March 2025 inside a bullet point in a results release, without a standalone announcement and without an acknowledgement that the earlier statement had been superseded. Twenty people's jobs and a market exit deserved their own document. For an institution whose chief executive campaigns for "directness, honesty and candour in all things you do," this is the place where the practice fell short of the principle.
The Home Question
In March 2024 more than ninety Canadian business leaders wrote to the federal finance minister urging Ottawa to "amend the rules governing pension funds to encourage them to invest in Canada." The letter, organised by the Montreal manager Letko Brosseau, made an argument that goes to the constitutional heart of what a public pension plan is for: "Without government sponsorship and considerable tax assistance, pension funds would not exist. Government has the right, responsibility, and obligation to regulate how this savings regime operates." The complaint was that Canada's largest funds put only about four per cent of their capital into publicly traded Canadian equities.
Ottawa responded in Budget 2024 by creating a working group under the former Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz to explore how to catalyse domestic investment by Canadian pension funds, with priority areas including digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, physical infrastructure, airport facilities, venture capital and homebuilding — and a mandate to consider lifting the thirty per cent voting-share cap that limits how much of a Canadian company a pension plan may control.
Taylor's answer, given to the Globe that month, is the single most-quoted sentence of his tenure and the clearest statement of fiduciary priority he has made: "If the ask is to invest here for a lower rate of return … then I'd struggle a little bit because my fiduciary duty is to our members to be able to provide them with the best returns I can to make sure the plan's funded."
It is worth being precise about what that sentence does and does not say. It is not a refusal to invest in Canada. It is a refusal to accept a return discount for doing so — which is the correct fiduciary position and the only one a pension trustee can defend. Every serious universal owner facing home-bias political pressure, in Ottawa or Riyadh or Canberra or Westminster, will eventually have to say some version of it.
The posture has nonetheless softened, and Ontario Teachers' has been open about that too. Its 2025 results release records that the plan "constructively engaged with the federal government to discuss 'nation building' projects and the Ontario government to consider large investments meant to bolster economic development. Discussions on investments from Ontario Teachers' in these projects are ongoing." Taylor also told the plan's April 2026 annual meeting that he would not rule out gas and liquefied natural gas projects — "Would we discount looking at gas and liquefied natural gas as a project? No we wouldn't" — and that defence had risen up the agenda partly because the plan was "being asked to do it by our local government," though its defence exposure remains under one per cent.
"We are clear that we would like to do more in Canada," he said in March 2025. The qualification is always the same: at a return the members are owed.
Retiring a Target
On climate, Taylor moved early, moved hard, and then in 2026 did something that will define how the rest of the industry judges him.
On 21 January 2021, three weeks into his second year, Ontario Teachers' committed to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Taylor's framing was unusually declarative for a pension chief executive: "As a global pension plan, we will leverage our scale and influence to transition to a low-carbon economy and create a sustainable climate future… With coordinated action net zero by 2050 is an ambitious but achievable goal."
He had already published his own argument, in the World Economic Forum's Agenda blog in March 2021, and it remains the clearest statement of the engagement case made by any Maple Eight chief executive. "Now, more than ever, investors have a dual responsibility to earn returns and make the world a better place," he wrote. "The challenge is balance – balancing our broader responsibility to the world while delivering on our fiduciary duty to look after every one of our teachers." And then, on divestment: "Investors are often asked if they will immediately divest holdings in companies that do not support the transition to net zero. I understand that instinct. And the fact is, it is easy to divest. But divestment does not fix the problem, it just passes it onto someone else." He finished with two sentences that could serve as the motto of universal ownership: "We must deal with these realities as they are, not how we would like them to be… Fundamentally, we believe it is better to retain a seat at the table than to walk away and hope others will do what is required."
In September 2021 the plan put numbers on it: a reduction in portfolio carbon emissions intensity of 45 per cent by 2025 and two-thirds — 67 per cent — by 2030, against a 2019 baseline, covering real assets, private natural resources, equity and corporate credit across public and private markets, including external managers. Alongside it sat a $50 billion green-investment ambition and, on the same page of the same report, the $300 billion asset target. The three sat together as a single scoreboard.
The intensity targets were then beaten. Reported reductions ran 32 per cent for 2021, 32 for 2022, 39 for 2023, 49 for 2024 — the 2025 target met a year early — and 50 per cent for 2025. Ontario Teachers' Finance Trust issued five green bonds between November 2020 and June 2025 totalling C$5.4 billion equivalent, 63 per cent in euros, with the framework assessed "Dark Green" by S&P Global's Shades of Green. Taylor's own justification never rested on virtue: "Why do we do it? I think because we believe in it, directed by our stakeholders. We've had very clear feedback from our members that they expect us to do it. We do it because we think we'll make better returns, because if we improve these companies with a better carbon footprint, they're more attractive and more valuable to third parties." He was equally direct about the limit: "The question I always get asked is, are you willing to compromise your returns to be able to deliver impact, to which the answer is always no." And, pre-emptively, on the charge that would inevitably come: "I have never been a proponent of investing for style purposes or for PR notoriety. … We actually do want to do the right thing. And that's not just social greenwashing. That is something that is important to me."
Then, on 19 February 2026, the plan published a 2026–2030 climate strategy that changed the architecture entirely. It introduced a 2030 target of $70 billion in "Climate Transition Aligned" assets in private markets — roughly double the estimated $35 billion in its existing programmes — and it retired the emissions-intensity target. The language is Ontario Teachers' own: "In line with its 2026-2030 climate strategy, Ontario Teachers' will retire its previously announced 2030 interim emissions intensity target and incorporate programs under its prior approach within the new CTA Framework." And: "Decarbonization will continue to be a core focus of asset management, even as emissions intensity is no longer a primary metric." The plan also confirmed that 2025 was the final year it would report a green-investment number — a number that had, in any case, fallen from about $34 billion to about $32 billion, reflecting "the sale of and/or valuation adjustments to certain green assets."
The 2050 commitment survives, in materially softer form: the plan "remains committed to taking an active role in supporting the global goal" and plans for its portfolio to be "primarily invested" in aligned or low-emissions assets by 2050.
Taylor's case is that this is a move toward reality, not away from it: "Our mission is to deliver retirement security for our members, and that includes effectively addressing material long-term opportunities and risks that come with climate change and the energy transition… the world's shift to cleaner energy is underway and represents a generational investment opportunity that stands to reshape economies." To the Globe, on the day: "This isn't essentially a new strategy. It's a development of a strategy we've been involved in for five years… We're still on a path to be aligned with net zero in 2050, so we've not given up on that objective." And, on the substitution: "Rather than change the composition of a portfolio to meet certain targets … we are really trying to focus now on areas where we have good line of sight and control to make a difference." His stated rationale is that emissions intensity "remains useful for company comparisons but not for measuring real-world progress on the energy transition" — a technically respectable argument, given that a rising denominator flatters an intensity ratio, and given that the plan's own 2024 disclosure showed absolute emissions down only 16 per cent against 2019 while intensity was down 49.
The criticism was immediate and specific. Shift Action, which grades Canadian pension funds on climate and had given Ontario Teachers' a B− overall with an F on fossil-fuel exclusions, conceded the new strategy "has the fund moving in a smart and strategic direction to focus on real-world decarbonization" and then made four charges: that it "needlessly waters down OTPP's net-zero commitment," replacing a portfolio target with "a vague commitment… that is neither credible nor accountable"; that it "strips out all previous climate targets for the OTPP portfolio," including a prior commitment to have 90 per cent of portfolio emissions covered by science-based transition plans by 2030; that on Shift's arithmetic a $70 billion target against a projected 2030 portfolio of around $400 billion could leave "nearly three-quarters of the portfolio lacking any clear or accountable climate objectives"; and that it lacks guardrails. Adam Scott, Shift's executive director, put the charge at the level of comprehension: "The leadership of major pension funds like Ontario Teachers' needs to question if they fully understand the gravity of the climate crisis for their institutions and their members."
The honest reading is that both sides have a real point and that the disagreement is about what a target is for. Ontario Teachers' argument is that a portfolio-wide intensity metric can be satisfied by selling high-carbon assets to someone else — precisely the move Taylor condemned in 2021 — and therefore measures nothing real. Shift's argument is that a target you can retire when it becomes inconvenient was never a constraint at all, and that replacing an accountable denominator with an unbounded numerator is a downgrade dressed as a refinement. Taylor is a universal owner; the whole logic of his position is that selling the problem does not solve it. That logic cuts both ways, and 2030 will settle it.
What He Is Paid
Ontario Teachers' discloses its chief executive's compensation in full, which is more than most global asset owners do, and the series tells its own story about how the board has read the years.
Taylor's total direct compensation — base salary, annual incentive and long-term allocation — was $5.6 million for 2021, $5.1 million for 2022, $3.7 million for 2023, $5.5 million for 2024 and $5.9 million for 2025, on a base salary that rose from $550,000 to $625,000 across the period.
The 2023 cut was explicit and explained. The board's compensation committee, chaired by Cathy Cranston, wrote: "This year's performance was challenged, with our 2023 value add below benchmark and 2023 real return slightly negative"; the enterprise scorecard came in at "a multiplier of 1.46 out of 2.0 (a 10% decrease in scorecard results year-over-year)"; and, "in balancing a decline in total fund aggregate four-year performance and Mr. Taylor's role in progressing Ontario Teachers' strategy, the board awarded him with a long-term incentive allocation of $1,854,700, which represents total direct compensation of $3.7 million (27% decrease year-over-year)." Roughly three-quarters of that reduction came out of the long-term allocation rather than the annual bonus — the board took it from the part of the package tied to future performance.
The recovery is where the disclosure gets quieter. The 2024 letter awarded Taylor "a multiplier of 2 times his target" on his individual objectives and restored total direct compensation to $5.5 million — and, in pointed contrast to the previous year's explicit "27% decrease," gave no percentage for the increase. The accomplishments cited were organisational rather than investment: completing a re-design that introduced a co-chief-investment-officer model, developing succession and development plans for the chief executive role, and setting a new five-year strategy. For 2025 the individual factor was 1.5 times target, with the committee writing: "In 2025, we delivered a strong return of 6.72%, however we need to focus on improving our value-add performance." One further change is worth flagging for governance readers: the 2023 and 2024 letters both described the "overarching key driver of compensation" as total fund performance "over a four-year period"; the 2025 letter describes it as "over both a 1-year and long-term period."
Set against peers, the numbers are modest. The Globe reported Taylor's 2022 compensation as $5.16 million — a figure that reconciles to neither of Ontario Teachers' two disclosed columns, so treat it with care — against a median of $8.6 million for the chief executives of the hundred largest companies on the Toronto Stock Exchange. He is running $303 billion for less than a mid-cap chief executive earns.
We should be equally careful about what is not in the record. No published article criticising Taylor's 2023, 2024 or 2025 pay was found. The contrast between a third consecutive year below benchmark and a record $5.9 million of total direct compensation is a legitimate observation for a reader to make, and we make it here as our own; it is not a reported controversy and we do not attribute it to anyone else.
The Duck Under Water
What is Jo Taylor actually like to work for? The public record is thinner on this than on any other dimension, but it is not empty, and what exists is consistent.
He prizes bluntness and says so: "I think there's a large premium in directness, honesty and candour in all things you do. Within the business, people know my style is basically, say it as it is and deal with difficult discussions, rather than try to avoid them." He is willing to correct himself in real time — when he felt he had left a journalist with a misleading impression about publicity-driven investing, he stopped and apologised mid-interview: "If that's what you've heard, I've given you the wrong impression, so I apologize."
On delegation, the formulation is precise and, after FTX, load-bearing: "We give people a fair amount of delegated responsibility which they like, and we just have to make sure there are the right control environments around them in terms of what they're doing." On culture, at the Financial Times summit: "We foster a strong culture of continuous learning… We also promote a culture of experimentation and empowerment. Ontario Teachers' is a fun workplace where we work on a lot of exciting initiatives and give people responsibility relatively early on to gain the hands-on experience they need to grow their careers." And on accountability, in 2026, describing what he has been pushing internally: "I'm very keen for everyone at Ontario Teachers' to be clear about what we're asking them to do, and they're accountable for the outcomes of what they've done. That has been a very strong message for everybody over the last 24 to 36 months."
He has a good line about the invisible half of the job, delivered after a modest first-half return in August 2025: "Underneath, that's been a duck under water: There's been quite a lot going on in terms of trying to make sure we are managing our risk." In the same conversation: "It's easy to forget, sitting here in August, some of the volatility we saw in April. We haven't forgotten that. We're trying to be quite careful about how we deploy new money." Asked once what kept him awake at night, he answered: "'Not much' is probably the honest truth" — before naming, in April 2023, the war in Ukraine as the risk hardest to price and widest in consequence.
And he has one story, told in 2022, that catches the whole strange position of a Canadian teachers' plan in British public life better than any amount of analysis. Asked whether he had met the Queen: "I did, yes. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson. He said to me, 'You're one of these Canadian plans that own quite a few of our assets.' And I said, 'No, we own quite a lot of your assets.' I ran down the list, and he went, 'Wow. I didn't realize it was that extensive.' But it was delightful to meet the Queen."
That exchange is the universal-owner condition in miniature: an institution so large and so diversified that the head of a G7 government does not fully know what it owns in his own country until it is read to him.
$303.2 Billion
On 10 August 2026 Ontario Teachers' reported a total-fund net return of 9.5 per cent for the first half of the year, 14.5 per cent over twelve months, and net assets of $303.2 billion — with net investment income of $26.6 billion in six months. Venture growth had reached $25.9 billion, nine per cent of net investments, on the back of SpaceX's NASDAQ listing.
Taylor's comment was brief: "We delivered a strong start to 2026, with a total-fund net return that is ahead of our target at this point in the year… We have entered the second half of the year with good momentum to deliver our annual performance objectives."
The plan did not declare victory over the $300 billion target. But on the two numbers it has published — $200 billion when he arrived, $300 billion by 2030 — the objective he set the whole organisation in 2020 was cleared in mid-2026, four and a half years ahead of schedule.
He immediately began managing the risk that came with it. Asked about the SpaceX position, he said something that very few chief executives say about a holding that has just carried their half-year results: "It would be false for us to say, either as an investor or from a member perspective, that we think the governance of SpaceX is perfect. It's not, and we bear that in mind in all of the investments we make." And on what happens next: "Over time we're going to have to look at that position and say, what is the right size for the portfolio? And part of that's going to be looking at opportunities where we're free to sell."
That is the FTX lesson applied in a moment of triumph rather than in a post-mortem — a plain public statement, about the best-performing asset in the fund, that its founder-control governance is imperfect and that the position will be trimmed. It is, in our view, the single most professionally impressive thing Jo Taylor has said in six and a half years.
What comes next is genuinely open. Steve McGirr — the board chair who selected Taylor in 2019 — retires at the end of 2026 after a full term, and Cathy Cranston, a director since 2019 and the author of the compensation letters quoted above, becomes chair on 1 January 2027. Cranston's own statement on appointment was studiously normal: she looked forward to working with "Jo Taylor and the entire executive team as they continue working to deliver the pension promise to Ontario's teachers."
No succession process for the chief executive has been announced, and as of the most recent primary sources — the April 2026 annual meeting and the 10 August 2026 results — Jo Taylor is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. We note that the 2024 annual report records "developed succession and development plans early in the year for the CEO role" among his own accomplishments, which is what a well-governed plan does regardless of anyone's intentions, and we decline to read anything further into it.
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What should a sovereign fund, a pension board or an endowment investment committee actually take from this record?
A public growth target changes an institution, for better and worse. The $300 billion number was not a fiduciary obligation, and it worked: it gave seven thousand people a common denominator, licensed the office build-out, justified the venture expansion, and was cleared four and a half years early. It also created a metric on which the institution could be seen to succeed while the metric that actually measures skill — value added against benchmark — went backwards for three straight years. Any allocator tempted to publish a headline number should notice both halves of that.
Size discipline is what makes a venture programme survivable. FTX was a total loss on a fraudulent counterparty. It cost less than 0.05 per cent of net assets and did not alter a single member's contribution or benefit. The programme that produced it went from three per cent of the fund to nine and returned 30.2 per cent in 2025. That is a system working as designed. The design decision — sizing venture positions so that any one can go to zero without consequence — was made before the loss, which is the only time it can be made.
The variable is founder control, not asset class. Ontario Teachers' committed, in settling its members' claim, to publish process enhancements specifically around founder-managed companies. That is the correct diagnosis of FTX and it generalises: a minority stake in a business with no independent board, no separation of affiliated entities and no auditable controls carries a risk that no amount of commercial diligence retires. Taylor then applied the lesson to SpaceX in public, while SpaceX was making him money.
Fifty countries to nine. The most valuable structural idea in this profile is the narrowing. For a universal owner, the marginal diversification benefit of an additional market is usually smaller than the governance cost of underwriting it remotely, and Taylor's four screens — predictable government, view on the economy, predictable regulation, and the currency — are a usable checklist. The corollary is that exits become necessary, and the Hong Kong closure shows both the discipline and the reputational cost of executing one.
Announce your retreats as loudly as your advances. The Hong Kong office closure was disclosed in a bullet inside a results release, nine months after a public commitment to maintain a presence. The strategic decision was defensible; the disclosure was not. Institutions are judged on the symmetry of their communications, and asymmetry is expensive precisely because it is noticed.
A retired target is a governance event. Ontario Teachers' beat its 2025 emissions-intensity goal a year early and then retired the 2030 one in favour of a $70 billion private-markets asset target. There is a serious technical argument for the change. There is an equally serious argument that a target you can retire was never binding. Boards setting long-dated climate commitments should decide, at the outset, what would have to be true for the target to be withdrawn — and write it down then, not in year five.
Say the number you are not happy with. "That said, our net return trailed our benchmark. Our active programs are designed to consistently deliver excess returns, but this was not the case in 2025." That sentence is in the chief executive's own letter, in the annual report, in the year he was paid a record $5.9 million. The willingness to put it there is not a small thing, and it is the reason this profile can be as critical as it is while remaining, on balance, admiring.
Sources and Method
This profile was compiled entirely from the public record. Primary sources include Ontario Teachers' own news releases and reports: the appointment releases of 24 January 2012 (London office), 1 December 2016 (Senior Managing Director, International), 26 June 2018 (Executive Managing Director, Global Development) and 9 July 2019 (President and Chief Executive Officer); the annual results releases for 2019 through 2025 and the half-year releases for 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026; the plan's official biography of Mr Taylor; the statement on FTX of 17 November 2022; the Teachers' Venture Growth rebranding release of 19 April 2022; the Singapore (28 September 2020) and Mumbai (27 September 2022) office openings; the Cadillac Fairview operating-model release of 12 June 2023; the net-zero commitment of 21 January 2021 and the interim targets of 16 September 2021; the 2026–2030 climate strategy of 19 February 2026; the Amica and Sahyadri disposal announcements; the Hammarlund appointment; the board-chair announcement of 16 July 2026; and the 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 annual reports, green bond report and 2022 responsible investing report, read as PDFs. One pre-Ontario Teachers' primary document is used: 3i Group's investor presentation of 3 March 2006, which supplies his only dated title at that firm.
Journalism relied on includes The Globe and Mail (David Milstead's appointment report of 9 July 2019 and profile of 16 June 2021; Trevor Cole's Report on Business profile of 22 March 2022; James Bradshaw's reporting of 20 March 2025, 11 August 2025, 19 February 2026 and 10 August 2026), the Financial Post (Barbara Shecter, 12 April 2023 and 15 August 2023), the South China Morning Post, Investment Executive, BNN Bloomberg, Chief Investment Officer, IPE Real Assets, PERE, The Standard (Hong Kong), RENX and Storeys, the Money Maze Podcast, and Shift Action's climate report card and coverage of the 2026 annual meeting.
Where the record is thin, this profile says so or stays silent. We do not print Mr Taylor's date of birth, his family circumstances, his address, the years or subject of his first degree, or any account of his childhood beyond the one published anecdote about his name; we do not name any employer between 3i Group and Ontario Teachers', because none is on the record; we do not attribute to him any board chairmanship other than Camelot, which is the only one Ontario Teachers' has documented; and we do not assert either that the plan recovered anything from the FTX estate or that it recovered nothing, because no source establishes either. Two claims that circulate about his career — a Nova Capital role and a Birmingham private-equity chapter — appear in no source we could inspect and are omitted. Several quotations reach us through secondary transcription of paywalled or broadcast interviews rather than through the original; each is flagged as such at the point of use. Figures are in Canadian dollars unless stated; Ontario Teachers' reports on a calendar year; 2026 figures are as at 30 June 2026 and were reported on 10 August 2026.
This is an editorial profile compiled from public sources. It is not an interview, and it implies no endorsement by the subject or the institution. Corrections: info@universalassetowners.com.