OMERS CEO Blake Hutcheson speaks at a U.S.-Canada Summit in Toronto in 2025. Mr. Hutcheson is taking on duties from former CIO Ralph Berg.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
The OMERS pension plan is redrawing its leadership structure to create more direct reporting lines to chief executive officer Blake Hutcheson after investment chief Ralph Berg left the fund this week to take a new job.
Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System announced Thursday that it is giving expanded roles to Michael Hill, who will oversee the plan’s infrastructure and private equity divisions worldwide, and to Scott McIntosh, who takes on responsibility for the plan’s equities team.
OMERS will not name a new chief investment officer, and Mr. Hutcheson will take on duties from Mr. Berg, whose departure to take a new role at Singaporean state-owned fund Temasek Holdings Ltd. was announced in June.
Five senior executives will report directly to Mr. Hutcheson, giving him clear responsibility for the fund’s investing activities on a daily basis. Those other executives will also share some of the duties that Mr. Berg used to perform, Mr. Hutcheson said in an interview.
“I have executives that are ready, executives I wanted to deputize,” he said. “I also, frankly, wanted to get closer to the investment business where I can lean in, add value, use my own relationships, and really help influence outcomes more than I have been able to in recent years.”
The Toronto-based pension fund manager has $145.2-billion of assets, as of the end of 2025, and invests on behalf of nearly 665,000 Ontario public-service workers at school boards, transit systems, electrical utilities and emergency services, among other employers.
Mr. Hill already led OMERS’s infrastructure investing program, and adds oversight of private equity. The plan’s head of private equity, Alexander Fraser, will report to Mr. Hill. So will head of private capital Michael Block, whose role is expanding to include leadership of key relationships with investment partners, as well as certain investments that do not neatly fit into a single business line, such as OMERS’s stake in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, the parent company of the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Raptors.
Mr. McIntosh, who leads global multiasset strategies, will now oversee the global equities team led by Kannan Venkataramani.
Kenton Bradbury, who leads total portfolio management, global credit head Kal Patel, and Oxford Properties CEO Eric Plesman are keeping their current roles and will report to Mr. Hutcheson.
OMERS earned a 6-per-cent return on its portfolio in 2025, and Mr. Hutcheson has said he is looking to add at least $10-billion in new investments in Canada to increase the plan’s domestic assets from 18 per cent to 25 per cent of the overall fund.
The CIO role had been part of OMERS’s top leadership team since 2018, when Satish Rai took on responsibility for several asset classes. Mr. Berg succeeded him in 2023.
But not all of Canada’s largest pension funds have CIOs.
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board each have a CIO who reports to the CEO.
But British Columbia Investment Management Corp. CEO Gordon Fyfe also serves as CIO, and the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec has no investment chief under CEO Charles Emond.
In 2024, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan split its CIO job in two, naming Gillian Brown as investment chief for public and private investments, and putting Stephen McLennan in charge of asset allocation.