Are Canadians selling their US assets for patriotism or profit?

The 2026 edition of the Marsh Global Asset Owner Barometer found that Canadian asset owners are planning to offload their US holdings at a higher rate than any other region in the world. The survey found that 52 per cent of Canadian asset owners had plans to reduce US equity allocations, above the North American average of 40 per cent, the Asia Pacific average of 31 per cent, and an average of 33 per cent in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. As Canadians stated their plans to reduce US exposure, they told Marsh that they’re planning to increase allocations to infrastructure. The question for investors and advisors is whether this move is being driven by natural profit taking from strong US markets or the geopolitical tensions now driving a rift between Canada and the United States?

Christine Tessier, Chief Investment Officer at Marsh People and Investments Canada in Toronto, takes a nuanced view of that question. She explains that the asset owners surveyed, primarily institutions and major money managers, tend to take a highly strategic view of the market that is less motivated by the political zeitgeist. Nevertheless, she says that enough has changed structurally in the relationship between Canada and the United States to motivate some of this strategic realignment among Canadian asset owners.

“Canadians have always been global investors in nature. And when you’re investing, you are measuring risk and return. The risk of investing in US assets has changed. Particularly when you’re standing in the vantage point of a Canadian. And the opportunity set is also changing because quite separate from the relationship between Canada and the US, the US also is changing its economic relationships with a lot of different economies. And that presents risks and opportunities,” Tessier says. “The broader global economy is creating geographical shifts and we’re seeing that in all investors, not just Canadians. Canadians obviously received the biggest level of shock, and so we’re seeing Canadians really diversifying in many different ways.”

How Canadians’ strategic view of US markets is changing

Tessier says that the Canadian clients Marsh is engaging with have raised a range of concerns about certain US assets, including concentration risk in US equities, issues with the US dollar, or high fiscal debt levels underneath US bonds. She notes that public assets tend to loom large in immediate decisions because they are the easiest positions to exit. However, certain private asset categories like private debt are becoming more sophisticated in other markets like Europe, motivating some reallocations by Canadian asset managers.

The fixed income segment, Tessier says, is in a degree of flux in part because of high debt levels in the US and much of the developed world. She notes, as well, that technology companies are issuing debt at a pace and volume never seen before to finance the AI buildout. She anticipates that technology-related debt will become as large a component of global bond indices as traditional government debt. These shifting dynamics in fixed income, Tessier says, has some investors revisiting their perceptions of safety in US bonds.

On equity markets, Tessier says that the Canadian asset owners surveyed by Marsh indicate a strong willingness to grow their global equity exposures. Some of that she attributes to strong US equity performance and a desire to diversify profits from that performance. She sees global markets as offering strong competition for investor capital and adds that while the US markets offer leadership characteristics in certain industries, asset owners are still looking globally.

Why Canada is still an outlier

The global macro forces and strategic realignment incentivizing a shift away from US assets apply to asset owners in every geography. Despite that, Canadian asset owners showed the greatest willingness to offload US exposures. Tessier offers three concurrent explanations for that outlier status: patriotism, global bias, and those aforementioned shifting opportunities.

There is a cohort of investor clients and asset owners, Tessier says, who are applying the patriotism of this current moment to their portfolios, preferring to invest in Canada and ex-US markets. That fits somewhat with Tessier’s view of Canadians as innately global investors, given the relatively narrow band of industries and opportunities that can be found in our domestic market.

Canadians’ preference for infrastructure also speaks to our “DNA” as investors, Tessier says. Canadians know how to invest in heavy, capital-intensive industries, and some of the recent incentives rolled out by the Federal Government has simply added to an existing momentum among investors in that space. She notes, though, that there is a growing interest in infrastructure funds aiming at new infrastructure required for the use and adoption of artificial intelligence.

While the survey Marsh conducted focused primarily on institutional asset managers, Tessier believes there are core takeaways for retail financial advisor. Namely that the new geopolitical, economic, and technological world being built right now is fraught with uncertainty. We don’t know exactly where power or leadership will lie on the other side of things. Diversification, in this environment, matters more than ever.

“The table has not yet been set. We’re seeing new supply lines being drawn, we’re seeing new geopolitical relationships being drafted, but it’s not clear where the chips will fall,” Tessier says. “In that case, I think global diversification really matters and any level of unrewarded risk matters.”