May 18, 2023

The Investment Manager Research (IMR) team oversees the investment managers of Canada Life’s mutual and segregated funds. They monitor, evaluate and rate the funds and their investment managers. This helps to ensure the investment managers and funds on our platform are relevant and competitive, so you can feel confident you’re providing the right investment solutions to your clients.

On May 17, 2023, Mackenzie Investments (Mackenzie) announced changes to their investment boutiques and teams, which impacts some Canada Life funds. Overall, the Investment Manager Research (IMR) team is comfortable with the strategic direction Mackenzie is heading with these changes.

The impact

Mackenzie is streamlining their investment boutiques to better align to their core competencies, reduce overlap and coverage across teams, and strengthen their overall investment capabilities. Effectively with these changes, the number of Mackenzie investment boutiques reduces from 17 to 16 with the amalgamation of Mackenzie’s North American Equity team with the GLC team. The combination of these teams creates one larger entity focused primarily on North American Equity and Income mandates. This new boutique will increase the investment resources allocated to Mackenzie’s North American strategies.

Other enhancements announced include a more modest impact to Mackenzie’s Multi-Asset Strategies Team (MAS). The changes impacting the MAS team will better align resources and support research capabilities across the team. The MAS team is a 20-person team focused on client solutions across the risk-return spectrum. The team continues to be led by Nelson Arruda, who is Senior Vice President and team lead for MAS.

While no change to the Global Quantitative Equity team led by Arup Data, Mackenzie is moving their low volatility center of excellence to Data’s team from the MAS team.

Impacted fund details

The following details the impact to Canada Life mutual and segregated funds, as well as the equivalent funds available through segregated fund policies originally issued by London Life and Great-West Life.

The IMR team believes that these strategic enhancements to Mackenzie’s investment boutiques will further strengthen their investment capabilities and outcomes to client portfolios. Mackenzie’s streamlining of their investment boutiques to enhance their investment excellence is consistent with the general trend we have witnessed across the industry, which we believe to be in the best interests of clients as the result is generally stronger investment capabilities.

Overall, the IMR team is comfortable with these changes and strategic direction Mackenzie is heading. Mackenzie is one of Canada’s leading asset managers and is a key sub advisor to Canada Life. As such, the IMR team has in-depth familiarity with Mackenzie’s boutique approach, their portfolio managers, and investment capabilities across various strategies. While there will be portfolio management changes to the impacted Canada Life funds (and equivalent funds available through segregated fund policies originally issued by London Life and Great-West Life), the IMR team is very familiar with the incoming managers, some of whom currently manage similar strategies on our platforms. In addition, there will be no immediate changes to the impacted Canada Life funds’ investment strategies, investment policy statements, portfolio parameters, benchmarks, investment category, risk ratings or fees to clients. The incoming portfolio managers will continue to manage the impacted funds to their current investment policy statements and guidelines.

The IMR team will continue to review and monitor these investment changes and continue to assess any potential impact to the funds.

The IMR team has also reviewed the changes from a Group Customer perspective. You can read their opinion here.

The views expressed in this update are current as May 18, 2023 and are subject to change without notice. This update is presented only as a general source of information and is not intended as a solicitation to buy or sell specific investments, nor is it intended to provide tax or legal advice.

These funds are available through a segregated funds policy issued by The Canada Life Assurance Company or as a mutual fund managed by Canada Life Investment Management Ltd. offered exclusively through Quadrus Investment Services Ltd. Commissions, trailing commissions, management fees and expenses all may be associated with mutual fund investments. Please read the prospectus before investing. Mutual funds are not guaranteed, their values change frequently, and past performance may not be repeated. A description of the key features of the segregated fund policy is contained in the information folder. Any amount allocated to a segregated fund is invested at the risk of the policyowner and may increase or decrease in value.

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