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It was reported that officials from BlackRock, the giant U.S.-based asset management firm, had been intimately involved in the planning and presentation of the bank, even going so far as to provide advance input into the Infrastructure minister’s speech to a group of BlackRock’s institutional clients in Toronto last November. Indeed, BlackRock executive Mark Wiseman is a member of the federal Advisory Council on Economic Growth that first recommended the bank, having been appointed when he was still president of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.

The presence of Wiseman on the advisory council, along with Michael Sabia, president of the CPPIB’s Quebec counterpart, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, was always a bit odd — public pension funds, with their fiduciary responsibility to act at all times in the best interests of their beneficiaries, should generally be kept as far away from politics as possible.

But it is positively peculiar to have the two so closely involved in the design and implementation of an agency with which they may well hope to do business. Indeed, the Caisse already has a pitch before the federal government for it to invest in a proposed light rail project in Montreal.

Well, which is it? Is the infrastructure bank too vulnerable to political influence, at the expense of its private investors? Or is it too much under the sway of private capital, at the expense of democratic accountability? The answer, quite possibly, is both. It is entirely plausible that its decisions may be affected by political considerations, but that private investors would be compensated for putting up with this in the form of overly generous terms.