Brookfield Asset Management
Does Mark Carney's ties to the company make him anti-Canadian? Is the company itself even anti-Canadian?
With an election possibly being announced as early as Sunday, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s connections to Brookfield Asset Management (BAM) will be scrutinized even closer than they already have been. The Prime Minister has been accused of being anti-Canadian for voting in favor of moving BAM’s headquarters from Canada to the U.S. Critics of Carney have also accused him of having conflicts of interest due to his ties to the company.
This article aims to analyze the headquarters move and provide some basic analysis of the company to determine if there is any evidence to support the idea that Carney is not supportive of the Canadian economy.
Brookfield Corporation versus Brookfield Asset Management
Firstly, there is an important distinction to be made. Brookfield Corporation (BN) is different from BAM. The origins of Brookfield can be traced back to a Brazilian utility company founded in 1899. After several name changes, the company began focusing on diversified investments in 1969. In 2005, it adopted the name Brookfield Asset Management. Later, it spun off 25% of its asset management business into a new company called BAM, and the original parent company was renamed Brookfield Corporation.
While BN still owns a controlling interest in BAM and BAM benefits from that relationship, Mark Carney was involved in both companies. He started with BN as Vice Chair and Head of ESG and Impact Fund Investing before moving on to BAM as chairman.
Headquarters Move
On November 4, 2024, in a letter to shareholders, BAM announced that it would move its headquarters from Toronto, Canada, to New York, U.S. The stated reasons for this move were to ease access to the much larger U.S. markets and to make the company eligible for inclusion in U.S. stock indices.
The timing is important here. There have been accusations that this move was due to tariffs announced by President Donald Trump on November 25, 2025. While it’s possible BAM had some advance notice of these tariffs, it seems unlikely as they announced the move prior to the tariff announcement and in fact before Donald Trump even won the election.
Critics argue that this move cost Canadians jobs and hurt the Canadian economy. However, in reality, this was more of a symbolic move. The company already had an office in New York, and it still maintains an office in Canada. BAM remains registered as a Canadian company and continues to pay applicable taxes to the Canadian government. While there may have been some minor personnel movement to the U.S., this represents a negligible amount compared to the company’s overall assets.
BAM’s Assets
This explains why the headquarters move is relatively inconsequential in the context of the company’s overall operations. BAM manages roughly $1 trillion USD in assets located around the world. These assets are what truly matter. If one wanted to gauge BAM’s confidence in a nation’s economy, they might examine whether there was a net increase or decrease in investments in that nation. For instance, if the company sold $2 billion worth of assets in a country but only invested $1 billion in new assets there, it might suggest a lack of confidence. Conversely, investing more than they divested could indicate confidence.
As public companies, both BAM and BN make their annual reports publicly available for analysis. While BAM’s reports list assets under management by region, they do not specify individual countries. However, BN provides consolidated financial statements that include data by country. While this data would include BAM’s assets, there is no way of knowing how much belong to each company.
Although this report shows consolidated assets by country, it does not provide data on net investments. A graphic circulating on social media summarizes the changes in BN’s consolidated assets by country, which critics claim indicates Carney’s lack of faith in the Canadian economy. However, there is insufficient data to support this conclusion. A smaller increase in consolidated assets in Canada could simply be due to poor performance of existing investments rather than a deliberate reduction in investment.
One conclusion that can be drawn from the data is that Brookfield is more invested in Canada relative to its GDP compared to other countries. Canada’s GDP is about 8% that of the U.S., but Brookfield’s investment in Canada is nearly 25% of its U.S. investment.
Countries in the chart by 2023 GDP:
United States: $27.721 trillion
Germany: $4.526 trillion
India: $3.568 trillion
Brazil: $2.174 trillion
Canada: $2.142 trillion
Australia: $1.728 trillion
Conclusion
The available data does not provide clear evidence to support the claim that Carney is anti-Canada. There is no clear numerical evidence to suggest that Carney’s actions at Brookfield demonstrate a lack of support for Canada. Additionally, moving the headquarters from Canada to the U.S. was largely inconsequential in terms of the company’s economic impact on Canada.