Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Power Corporation fourth quarter and year-end 2021 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. Now, it is my pleasure to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Mr. Orr, President and Chief Executive Officer of Power Corporation. Thank you. Please go ahead. Thank you, operator, and welcome everyone to our Q4 and year-end 2021 results call. I'm really pleased that you're here with us this morning, and I will get right into the presentation. On pages two and three, you have the normal disclaimers regarding forward-looking and non-IFRS and non-GAAP financial measures. On page four, you've got the smiling faces of myself and Greg Tretiak, who is our Chief Financial Officer, is here with me this morning, and together we'll be going through the results. If I move you to page six in the presentation, you just have some highlights there of some of the recent either earnings releases, earnings calls, or capital markets presentations that Power and its group companies have been involved in over the last month or so. Welcome all of you to go directly to Great-West Life, IGM, or GBL for any information you have with respect to their results. I know they would be pleased to engage with you. With that, I will turn to page seven, which is really the summary of some of the highlights that I would like to talk about today. I think, 2021 and the fourth quarter both evidenced the strong earnings growth and momentum that we've been talking about for quite a period of time, saying we have believed that our underlying businesses have strong organic growth, and as well those being helped with acquisitions. We'll talk a little bit about that during the presentation. Another highlight of the last quarter was on the 5th of January. The group announced the consolidation of our interest in China AMC under IGM. That continues as a further step to simplify our corporate structure, which continues to be a theme of our activities, as is returning capital to shareholders. In addition to the dividend increase that was announced in November, that dividend, of course, was also declared yesterday at the same heightened level of CAD 0.495. Also, relaunched a new NCIB in February, and we will talk a bit about that as we go through the presentation. Another theme we'd like to pick up on is the continued growth of the alternative asset management platforms with significant fundraising throughout 2021, including in the fourth quarter, and then the acquisition by Sagard of EverWest from Great-West Lifeco, which has added more AUM and scale to our asset management activities. With that, I'll turn to page eight and pass the microphone over to Greg. Thank you, Jeff. I'll just do a quick highlights on the earnings per share for the year and for the quarter. We don't usually do the year, but given that it was a record, we thought we should at least acknowledge that. You can see that the adjusted earnings for 2021 were CAD 4.77, up significantly from 2020's CAD 3.07. With that, I'm just gonna go straight over to the Q4 results and give you a little color on the detail. We're reporting an adjusted earnings per share of CAD 1.00, up CAD 0.07 from Q4 of 2020's CAD 0.93. You would have all participated, many of you, and seen the results that were reported by our publicly traded companies, and you can see that they contributed CAD 1.04 versus CAD 0.89 in Q4 of last year. Our alternative asset investment platforms, which basically is Sagard and Power Sustainable Energy. That includes not only the management companies, but it also includes our seed capital or our proprietary capital devoted to seed capital to those platforms. You can see relatively routine quarter contributing CAD 0.05, which was the same as last quarter or last year's CAD 0.05 as well. China AMC, of course, has already reported its results, and IGM has shared that with you. We're showing it as contributing CAD 0.02. In reality, it was CAD 17 million versus CAD 12 million last year. That is a significant increase. They continue to do well, and we'll have more to talk about later on in another slide in the deck. The standalone businesses, no realizations in the quarter of significance, other than GP Strategies and also that the 2020 number included a gain on Easton, which is in that CAD 0.07 that you see there. Finally, the corporate line, you can see that it's CAD -0.13 versus the CAD 0.10 in Q4, and that is due to a tax benefit that we recorded in Q4 of 2020. With that, I'd take you to the next page, which is the NAV. Again, some very quick highlights. You'll see that the NAV was CAD 52.60 at the end of December. Not a lot of change over Q3, but up 27% from the CAD 41.27 in December of 2020. You'd be wondering what the Ukrainian and Russian war has done to the markets in terms of the NAV. You know, we'll see that on March 17th, we have it at CAD 50.11. It has come down slightly during this period of volatility. The only other comments I'd make on the NAV slide are that of course, we announced the China AMC deal, and we marked it at that particular transaction price. Here you see it rounded to CAD 1.2 billion. It was actually CAD 1.15 billion. Lion, which is in the standalone businesses, is down about CAD 200 million from the prior period. The other thing I would say is cash is CAD 1.6 billion at the end of the year, and we'll have comments on that later on. I'll pass that back to Jeff. Thanks, Greg. We're calling it Adjusted Net Asset Value from this quarter forward based upon accounting guidance, is my understanding. Adding the word adjusted actually doesn't change anything. It's the same definition it's always been. It's just we call it Adjusted Net Asset Value. Great, Jeff. Thank you. I'm a wannabe CA, as you know. Right. You're aware of that. Okay. Let me turn to then the next few pages and, you know, the next three pages. I'm on page 10. It's just a restatement of our strategy. I'm not gonna go through these pages. Most of you on the line have probably heard me and Greg go through them many, many times. I am conscious, and we are conscious of the fact we may have some new listeners on different calls, and people often go to our last quarterly results when they're looking for a deck to describe us. As people get introduced to PowerCorp, we continually reemphasize the playbook that we are following. You can see it again on page 11 in terms of how we talk about the different levers that we are pursuing to create value. Then on page 12, we talk about the strategies that our major public companies are pursuing themselves, which is part of our overall value creation strategy. Thank you for indulging us as we go through those three pages and continue to have them in our presentations. I'll go to page 13, and I talked at the outset about the year and the quarter evidencing the strong earnings growth and momentum, which we have been talking about for some time. It was both organic and M&A driven. Very, very strong results in 2021. Great-West Life had record net earnings. We could say they had record base earnings, but since they've only been covering base earnings or calculating them for a few years, it wasn't a very meaningful statement. Had they been, we expect it would have been record. On a net basis, it was record earnings. You know, Q4 had a little bit of weakness from Q3. You know, a few things, I think Great-West Life went through that. Empower was down a little bit from Q3, excuse me, sequentially. Some of that was a little bit of one-timers, and there's a little bit of higher expenses in the fourth quarter. There's nothing in that quarter that changes our view as to the progress that Empower is making or the earnings trajectory that we see for the business going forward. We thought it was a solid quarter, and overall a terrific year for Great-West Lifeco. Same thing with IGM. In their case, it was virtually all organic growth. We have been telegraphing for some time that we thought the very strong momentum that IGM had been experiencing in the marketplace would result in earnings growth as the top line was growing. It had been driven and continues to be driven by Mackenzie. IG Wealth really illustrated in 2021. As we went through into even the first part of this year with their sales, that there's good momentum at IG Wealth. We're really pleased about this part of our story, which we think at the end of the year, we look back at and say, "Terrific growth in the underlying earnings." Page 14. Just a few comments on the transaction to move the 13.9% stake that Power owned into IGM. It does a number of things for us. First of all, it is very consistent with our overall strategy of simplifying the group. The second thing it does is we think that having the entire stake of China AMC in IGM will result in much better value recognition. Think about the size of the overall 27.8% block and the earnings and the earnings growth within IGM, it's a meaningful part of IGM and will continue to grow, we assume, over time. So that's something that we think will get recognized, kind of got lost within PowerCorp as an investment of CAD 1 billion or so within our overall stream of assets. We think it'll get better value recognition within IGM, and it belongs there, quite frankly, from a partnership and industrial logic point of view. We were really pleased to buy more shares of Great-West Lifeco. Very keen on what Great-West Lifeco is up to. We were pleased to facilitate the financing of the transaction for IGM by, in effect, taking half of the money that we received in buying shares of Great-West Lifeco. Finally, it provides cash to PowerCorp to continue with our return of cash to shareholders. That's after the purchase of the Great-West Lifeco stock and paying a little bit of tax in China that we anticipate still provides a good chunk of cash that'll help fund our buybacks. There's four good reasons why we love the transaction, and the business of CMHC continues to progress very well. Let's spend the next couple of pages, starting with page 15, just talking about GBL and looking at what GBL has done over the year. They recorded very strong growth in their NAV, 13% per share over the year. The theme at GBL is very strong rotation of the businesses that they own. You can see how the NAV traveled from the start of the year to the end of the year, and really a greater emphasis on private companies. From over the 12-month period, they went from having 17% of their assets in private companies to 25% of their assets. It's a rotation that's continuing. The Webhelp, the Canyon Bicycles, you can see some examples of where they are putting their capital. Sienna Investment Managers not only are they getting into private assets, but they're also starting to get into the asset management business themselves with third-party asset management. Real change happening at GBL. You see some of that on page 16, played out in terms of some of the actual disposals of public companies like Holcim or Umicore, and then more money into privates, more money into Sienna. I would encourage you to look at the March 11th results presentation. It's referred to on that early page. If you go on their webpage, it does a very good job of describing the strategy that GBL is pursuing and the amount of energy going into building out that business. Okay, the other theme on page 17 is the alternative asset management businesses that we are building at PowerCorp, and stop at the end of the year here and say, down in the lower right, we ended the fourth quarter of or the year of 2020 with CAD 8.5 billion under management or committed, so funded and unfunded AUM. We ended December 31st of this year with CAD 19.1 billion. That was as a result of fundraising, a result of the EverWest transaction, and a result of capital appreciation on the position. All three were driving it. On the funded side, on the lower right of the slide, you'll see that the funded went from 5.6 to 14. Obviously, the difference between funded and unfunded, we've got investors who have committed to put money up, but the money actually has to get invested in these funds. That's the portion that's been invested. You see the growth there, and you see in the dark the Power Corp portion of that, it really has stayed constant, and the growth has come from third parties, including in this case some Canada Life involvement. The overwhelming majority of the external funding is coming from parties other than Power and Canada Life. In the EverWest case, of course, a lot of the EverWest money was Canada Life, or was Great-West Lifeco money, I should say, and Canada Life money. They are investors in that. Let me flip to the lower left side of the page, and you'll see some of the profitability from the asset management company. Sagard, just from a management fee alone, perspective, had CAD 100 million in management fees in 2021. Basically getting close to breakeven here on a fee-only basis. They had a very good year for carry. A lot of that was the carried interest. A lot of that was driven by their fintech investments. That is quite an unusual, very high number. It's not to say it won't be done again, but we would not expect that to be an annual event on that level of profit. This business is, you know, Sagard is getting a lot of scale and getting very close to the point where it's gonna be contributing earnings to the company. Power Sustainable is not as far along in terms of its development. To remind everyone, the Sagard business had some businesses that were already in the third-party funding business. The fintech strategy, Sagard, in Europe had been, you know, funding from third parties for a couple of decades or 15 years at least. The strategies in Power Sustainable had really, when we switched strategies, two years ago, were really 100% PowerCorp strategies. That group has spun out and had to, you know, build up their third-party distribution, building up their activities. They're making good progress in terms of third-party funding, but still have a ways to go in terms of getting the scale on their management fees. Just a little vignette into the profitability. I just draw your attention to the last bullet point on page 17. The fee-bearing capital, we just break it out here, is at year-end 11.4 versus the 14 that you see at the bottom right. Of course, the difference is you get paid on the committed capital, not on the capital appreciation when you're running these businesses. We just break that out to help you reconcile if you're looking at trying to tie fees to assets. Okay. I'll switch over to page 18. Page 18 is just a little more detail as to how the strategies play out in between Sagard and Power Sustainable. You do see at the top of the page the breakout between the growth and the AUM that came from fundraising, CAD 4.2 billion, very significant. We did have the acquisition of EverWest in the fourth quarter. You see now under Sagard in the bottom right that that real estate investing capability at the U.S. real estate platform is a significant part of their AUM. I'll move to 19. On page 19, we just talk again about what are we doing here, building out alternative asset management businesses. Well, firstly, we had a lot of these capabilities that had been built at Power Corp. We're now adding to them. Even prior to us shifting strategies, we had these teams that had very good track records, so we were building from a position of strength. We've been able to attract very good teams at Power and within these platforms. Also there's synergies with what Great-West Life and IGM and GBL are doing, and we're helping each other here. You got some of the points there. Great-West Life is looking to advance its strategy to put alternatives on its own balance sheet. It's looking for those assets to help with its own products and its own solutions for its clients. It's in the financial services business, so being around a very active fintech ecosystem is very, very useful for them to understand what's happening in their businesses. Then in the case of IGM, very much the same strategy. Their purchase along with Great-West Life of Northleaf is evidence of that, but they're also investing in some of the strategies at Power. Then GBL, I've already talked about their shift into private assets and their own shift into investment management. This is really a group effort, and there's a lot of benefits that are going back and forth between the public companies and PowerCorp. Shifting gears on page 20 to our efforts to monetize assets, and this is not just to create cash to return to shareholders, but is also part of the simplification of the group. You see at the top four transactions. There are four transactions we highlight over the year that resulted in proceeds coming into Power. I think we've talked about each of them. That created cash. In January 5th, the announcement of China AMC, as I mentioned in my comments, that also, after the fact that we purchased Great-West Life shares, pay a little bit of tax in China, there's another CAD 500 million that is freed up for capital that we're able to return to shareholders. I've said in all of our comments that while we plan to buy shares back, we will always prioritize if one of our operating businesses is doing some sort of transaction and needs our support for capital, we would prioritize that. We always try and do those deals without putting much capital into them if we can. That would be the priority if they had a transaction that required an equity infusion. In the absence of that, our intention is to return the capital to shareholders. Page 21, those were the four standalone businesses that we identified when we launched the strategy. GP Strategies at the bottom has now been disposed of. You know, on the other three, you know, we are going to continue to support the buildup of those businesses with the management teams and in some cases with other shareholders. We will be looking to monetize that at the appropriate time that makes sense for Power and makes sense for our partners in those businesses. That still is very much in the playbook and part of the strategy, but we're not putting any kind of timeline to our and pinning ourselves into a corner that we have to do something by such and such a date. That's not the right way to maximize value for PowerCorp or our shareholders. Greg, I'll turn it back to you to make some comments on our capital and the whole share buyback topic. Great. Thank you, Jeff. I'm on page 22 and start with capital transactions. You will have all seen that in October we took advantage of some attractive rates on perpetual prefs. Some of us are wont to say this is a security that is traded by appointment and the windows to actually take advantage of those opportunities don't present all the time. We were pleased to do that. That's going to yield about a CAD 3 million reduction in our annual financing expense. You'll recall that back at the time of Next, we said that we would potentially entertain redeeming some prefs to reduce our financing expenses as well. I think at this point in time, we see greater opportunity for shareholder value creation to buy back our own common equity. We have reinitiated our Normal Course Issuer Bid. You can see that we bought CAD 153 million worth of shares through 2021. In 2022 year- to- date, we've done about CAD 112 million. I'd just say that I had mentioned earlier on that we have cash on the balance sheet of about CAD 1.6 billion. There is a dividend that's payable usually in the first weeks of the coming quarter. We usually keep a little less in when we think about that number. About CAD 1.3 billion is what we think is the cash on hand. As you can see in the bullet point there that we keep 2x our fixed charges, which is roughly about CAD 800 million. That's about CAD 500 million of cash that we have available to repurchase stocks. Of that CAD 500, as I said, we've done about CAD 112 million, so we've got about CAD 400 million that we are looking to utilize to repurchase stock in the coming months. Of course, when CAMC closes in the second quarter, we should have an additional CAD 500 million to put to work. We'll revisit it at that time and certainly talk to you about it. That takes me to page 23. We've achieved our goal. We were almost there in Q3, but we've gotten there. We have achieved our targeted expense reduction of CAD 50 million. You can see our run rate and targeted run rate are CAD 38 million a quarter. I'd just say that, in addition to this, well, as we were rationalizing some of the businesses and in particular our real estate business, we have sold or have commitments to sell five properties of the six that we actually hold. That's gonna yield another CAD 60 million in terms of additional cash that we can use. I think that's the end of the story on expenses. Jeff, I'll turn it back to you. Okay, thanks. Just before I wind up the comments, I'll just stop on page 24 and make a comment on the discount to NAV. Yeah, we're obviously pleased after having historically been around 15%, and actually at certain times, even lower than that. We had then traveled for a period of time where our discount was closer to 35%. Over the last three years of work, starting with the sale of the U.S. life insurance business by Great-West and the three-way buyback, and then the reorganization, and then the new strategy and all the things we've been doing, we've been driving that discount down. We think that aside from the expenses that we have at the Holdco, which gets you to, if you discount those, gets you to somewhere around a 3% NAV discount. The rest of it is all open season for us to work on through our simplification and proving that we can how we add value at the Power Corp level. The discounts continue to come down. It has widened out in the last couple of months here as we've gone through some I would say shakier markets. We just view that as an opportunity at this point. We continue to be very focused on driving this as an additional the discount down as an additional lever of value creation. Page 25 just speaks to what our group is doing on the ESG front. Every public company is focused on this. Every company should be focused on this. We think we're very well- positioned to continue to make progress on it. It just highlighted at the top of the page there that in 2021, Power is one of only three companies in Canada to receive an A leadership rating on the Carbon Disclosure Project. You've got there for Great-West, IGM and GBL, all of our companies are very active on their ESG strategies on their net zero commitments on their launching of funds and launching of products for their clients as well. They've got their own corporate activities, they've got their own balance sheets, and then they've got the money that we're managing on behalf of clients, and they're all under intense focus from what we're doing on the ESG front. I'll conclude with just the standard page on; we're still very optimistic. Got lots of opportunity across these three levers of value creation. We obviously have done a lot. We've put a lot of capital to work in the past 18 months. No question from in terms of the size of the capital and in particular, you look at Great-West Life, they've got a period of time where they're gonna need to rebuild their balance sheet. They've also got three integrations going on with the Prudential retirement transaction has not closed yet. It's targeted to close right at the start of Q2. They'll have three integrations going on. You know, that is obviously a focus of Great-West Life, but it is not stopping us from looking at what comes next and laying the seeds from where we take the M&A strategy going forward across the group, including at Great-West Life. Very excited about what we still have to do. With that, I will conclude my remarks, and we can turn to the period of the meeting where we take your questions. Operator, I would ask you to open up the floor to questions. Thank you, sir. As a reminder to all participants, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Again, that is star one on your telephone keypad. However, if your question has been answered and you wish to withdraw from the queue, just press the pound key. Stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question is from Geoffrey Kwan with RBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. My first question was when you think about the potential acquisitions that Great-West and IGM could make over, you know, say, the next few years, if there was a need for them to raise equity, do you see the plan to maintain your ownership stake in them, or would you be willing to dilute down your ownership stake? The reason I'm asking that is I'm just trying to understand how you think about Power's balance sheet in terms of potential uses of cash, both from the cash that you've got right now, but also as you monetize some of these non-core assets and whether or not that ultimately sees greater focus on share buybacks given where the discount to NAV is today. Thank you, Jeff. Good morning. There's not a specific black and white answer to the question, so let me answer it based on the principles we would follow. As I mentioned in the call, if one of our operating businesses needed to raise capital and equity capital to do an attractive transaction, we would prioritize that over buybacks any day. That would be our first priority. The second piece of your question, though, is we don't have a bright line as to dilution or non-dilution. We're not in favor of diluting ourselves in general. If you look at the history of the acquisitions, London Life, Canada Life, for example, while the group put up capital to support the transactions, they were big deals in the context of what Lifeco was doing, and there was some dilution. In other words, we Power Financial in that case and at that point participated, but we participated less than the public. There was a little bit of dilution that occurred. It wasn't part of a grand master plan. Let's get ourselves diluted by a point or two. It was just simply we had an incredibly attractive transaction. It needed a lot of capital to get done. It needed the public markets, and we kicked in, as I recall, CAD 400 million or CAD 500 million. I might have those numbers wrong, but that order of magnitude. We would support transactions. We typically don't like to issue equity if we don't have to in our deals. That's not the playbook we like to follow. If it's a very attractive transaction and we need the equity to get it done, we will certainly do so. We will support those. Whether we dilute or we don't dilute at the margin, I think just depends on how much cash, what's our financial position at the time, how big the deal is. It'll be very situation specific. I hope that answers the question. No, it does. My next question was you have, you know, classified Sagard and Power Sustainable separately in your financial reporting. I'm just wondering, is there any merit to merging those two entities together, whether or not it's giving greater scale and synergies or other reasons as you look to build up your third-party asset management business? These are businesses that have capital in them, but they actually are people businesses. They've run and they succeed based on the people and the teams that are in place, just like any other asset management business. In these cases, these businesses actually came up within Power with different groups operating them. They have different histories. They've got different people involved in it. As we look at that, we think that trying to combine those would actually do more damage than trying to leave them where they are. So that's the first reason. It's the reason as you go across our group and many other groups in asset management, whether it is public securities you're trading or private securities, you have different investment management companies existing across big financial groups. It's because of the cultural aspect that, you know, everybody came to work at a certain place. They bought into what was being done, and if you try and combine it with someone else, you can really destroy. You can think you're saving costs and getting scale, but you actually lose a whole bunch of your key people and you're destroying value. We are happy to pursue it at this time. They are pursuing slightly different strategies in the market as well in terms of their positioning. That's the answer to your question. No plans at this point, Jeff. We think that would do more damage than help at this point. Okay. Just my last question was on GBL. They have their Sienna Investment Managers business. Just wondering if that's something you could see as a source of collaboration by partnering to distribute some of their strategies and vice versa, or even if it's, you know, a business that at some point down the road might be interesting to acquire to scale up again, your third-party asset management business. Yeah, good question. Very good question. You know, GBL, in general, and Sienna specifically they have been cooperating with Power Corp. They've been cooperating with Sagard Europe. There's a lot of communication, as you can imagine, across the groups in terms of both getting product for their clients as well as deal flow. I will just go back to the history of Sagard Europe in Power, which is going back to private equity business in France, which really came out of the GBL investments, was one of the key motivators for it. GBL was focused on doing larger transactions in the European market, and they were getting all these opportunities that were below their radar screen, and that was part of the thinking in starting this Sagard Europe private equity business, that we can get a deal flow here. We own the second-largest holding company in Europe. They're all over the deal flow in Europe. That's the whole starting of Sagard Europe was in fact cooperation with GBL, and that continues as we get into private alternatives into an even greater extent. Greg, did you wanna add to that? Yeah. I think you'll see, Jeff, that in fact, Sienna has invested in some of the Sagard vehicles and that collaboration also extends right up to the governance structure of those organizations where you know, some of the senior officers of each of the groups will sit on each other's boards. You know, Paul III is very active at GBL and also, Colin Hall, who's the CIO at Sienna, sits on the Sagard board. There's a lot of cross-fertilization, if you will. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Kwan. Your next question is from Graham Ryding with TD Securities. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning. Good morning. Could you maybe just elaborate or provide some color just on the fundraising outlook for 2022? Maybe what are some of the sort of strategies or what does the pipeline look like across your different, you know, verticals in an alternative platform? Your question is with respect to the alternatives, right? Not across all the asset management business? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I would say. Yeah, your alternatives platform. The plans are continued robust fundraisings in the existing strategy as well as the launching of new strategies. I could talk a bit about that. The question mark is the current environment, Graham, of kind of market instability, and then geopolitical instability of what's going on in Russia and Ukraine that's kind of got obviously a question mark over everything. How does this play out and how much risk is in the market. You know, I think so that's there. Part of the backdrop even before the geopolitical issues has been with inflation coming to a higher point and a much greater concern in the market in the last, you know, going back, let's call it till the start of the fall. You've had a sell-off in the tech sector, so public valuations of tech companies overall has been well off, as you're aware. The NASDAQ is down, I think, 14% year- to- date alone. In terms of the tech side of it, what does that do to fundraising on the fintech side? We've just raised a bunch of capital, by the way, in Portage III, as you no doubt have seen. Maybe that's a good thing because we get into an investment cycle where valuations pull off a bit, but for future fundraising. There's question marks out there, Graham. I mean, I think that the businesses had a great year in fundraising, as you saw, and I went through on the slide. They had ambitious plans for 2022. We're just all aware the environment is a little bit more challenging right now than it was three or four months ago. We don't know how that's gonna play out, but it's not a positive development. We could go through a harder period here in the quarters ahead. And I- Anything, Greg? Yeah. I'd just add that, you know, they are investors, and they're cognizant of the environment and understand the challenges obviously. There's going to be dislocation for sure, which brings sometimes opportunity, b ut they're also in spaces where, you know, there's a lot of money that has to go in, if you will, to green movement in terms of infrastructure and things like that. You know, there's lots of work that has to be done, and there's capital that has to be put to work, not only in the parts of the world that we are operating in, but in particular our own country. Great. Does that answer your question, Graham? Yep. Yep. That was helpful. I'm just wondering about sort of the outlook for rising rates here. You know, as you sort of at the Power Corp level, you look across your publicly traded operating companies and also your alternative investment management platform. You know, maybe at a high level, what parts of your business are you thinking that rising rates might be a headwind, and where might it be a benefit? Yeah. It's a great question, and it's a big question. In general, in the insurance part of our insurance business, which is a funny way of saying it, but as you know, not everything that Great-West Lifeco does is pure insurance. In the insurance business, higher rates have typically been a good thing, and lower rates has put a squeeze on profitability. Now, as you know, Great-West Lifeco runs a very matched book, so we don't have an existing book that benefits from rates going up because we're matched. But in terms of the profitability of new products that are being written when rates are higher, there is more room for margin and spread, and profitability has typically been higher. Rates in and of themselves is a good thing. Inflation is in and of itself a bad thing because all of these businesses have operating costs. When you've got operating costs that are going up, either because, you know, labor is costing more, your people costs are going up, or there's shortages of supply and you've got costs going up in terms of other systems and whatnot, that can put a squeeze on profitability and hurt margins. That would be two off the top comments. What does the impact of inflation have, and rising rates, what does that do to the equity markets? What does it do to corporate profitability overall? How does that get translated, if yields are higher in bond markets, and we've got inflation pressures across the corporate spectrum, what does that do to equity valuations and the whole mood around capital markets? That's a bigger macro question that is less related to our business specifically. But of course, we earn a lot of fees on the market levels, and our businesses grow better when there's a lot of investor confidence and money flowing into investment funds. Those bigger macro questions would have an impact on our businesses, but it's too early to tell at this point. I don't have a crystal ball where it's what everybody's kind of thinking about and trying to get a handle on. That would be my answer to the question, Graham. Yep. No, that was helpful. Then my last one, if I could just, I know you did a financing round for KOHO subsequent to year-end. Is there anything material there from, you know, I think you were involved in selling a bit, selling a piece in that financing round. Anything material on your NAV there, or is that too small of an investment for you? Yeah. Yeah, it was very small. I'm trying to remember the number. I thought it was like about CAD 20 million-CAD 30 million, Graham. Earnings 11. Earnings 11. Okay. That's it for me. Thank you. It's another example of, you know, the strength of our fintech franchise here and again, the kind of investments they've been making. Thanks for highlighting it. Is that it, Graham? Okay, I think Graham's gone. Operator? Yes, sir. Your next question is from Nik Priebe with CIBC Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Okay. Good morning. Maybe continuing on the conversation around your fintech platform. I just wanted to start with a pair of questions on Wealthsimple. I just wanted to confirm that the fair value of that investment has not been updated in your NAV since the investment round in May of last year, right a nd how well-funded is that business for 2022? Are they gonna need to come to market again here? You wanna answer that? Go ahead, Greg. Well, the fair value has not changed. I wouldn't necessarily answer for Wealthsimple about their plans with respect to their capital, but I would say that I'm not aware of anything on the horizon that would cause them to be coming back to the market. Jeff, I don't know if you- No, I don't have clear visibility into that at this point as well. They raised a fair bit of capital. Although we did a secondary, as you know, we ourselves and IGM sold CAD 500 million. There was, I think, CAD 250 million of cash that went into treasury or thereabouts. With that, they have continued to expand their marketing and their outreach into new parts of the market with the introduction of new products. As a consequence, they're getting more aggressive in the market, and the investor base that came in to support them expects them and wants them to do that. I think they're well-funded, but they're also out there building businesses, and they are, as a consequence, using up that cash. I don't have clear visibility. I'm not even sure their board does at this point as to. I don't have clear visibility, specifically as to whether they need, at what point they're gonna want to raise more capital. Okay. Understood. Just a point of clarification, and this one might be for Greg. When interpreting the asset management earnings contribution presented on slide 17, which I believe excludes mark-to-market gains on proprietary capital, does the earnings contribution of CAD 41 million include fees and carried interest earned on proprietary capital as well? Sorry, I'm just going to the slide first of all. Yeah. I lost it. Okay. Yeah. The question is, does the carry, I think, include gains on the proprietary capital, as well? I think the answer is yes. Yes, it does. Yes. Yeah. You're page 17. In the CAD 41 million of asset management contribution from Sagard and Power Sustainable, it does include the carry on proprietary. Nik, the way to think about it is we think about the business in two buckets. We have an asset management business that we own a majority of the GP, all of the GP, the general partner in the case of Power Sustainable, and a majority of the GP management and now Canada Life with the EverWest transaction owns part of that GP. We think of that as we earn fees and we earn carry. The carry, of course, is split between the professionals in the business get some of the carry, and then the GP gets some of the carry. The carry, the source of the carry is all the capital, including the third-party capital and the Power capital. We then have a second part of the business that we think of as we're a limited partner, and that's our seed capital. We have roughly CAD 2 billion or what have you across the strategies invested in the seed capital. In that context, we're getting different kinds of returns depending on the strategy. In effect there, we're paying the carry. When there's a big gain, the limited partner investors, of course, provide carry to the GP when there's a realization. That's conceptually how we think about it. What's on page 17 is looking at it as an asset manager, the GP only. Understood. Okay. Yeah. I was just trying to get a better understanding of what the GP earnings might look like, you know, excluding fees earned on proprietary capital. Maybe we can take that one offline, but yeah, that's helpful. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah. That's it for me. Yeah, we'll take it offline. That's a good idea. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Nik, thank you. Your next question is from Tom MacKinnon with BMO Capital. Please go ahead. Yeah, good morning, and thanks for taking my question here. It has to do with you simplified the structure here with respect to China AMC. Just continuing that simplification question with respect to Wealthsimple here, owned in pieces at both IGM and the Power Corp level. So the question kinda is: Where do you think it's best to put Wealthsimple to- You know, to optimize Wealthsimple and to get the best value recognition throughout the Power group. Yep. Hi, Tom, a good question. So, the simplification. I'm going to, I'll go specifically to your question, and then I'll go more general. The history of Wealthsimple is that, you know, we started with a FinTech strategy at Power Financial at the time, and the initial rounds were done there. As Wealthsimple started to really grow, we started to realize that this could be a very significant distribution and company in Canada. Our wealth distribution business, IGM is a big part of that. The management at IGM had been part of sourcing the deal originally. The subsequent rounds, I think we did 5 or 6 rounds in total when we invested CAD 300 over three years or so. Subsequent rounds came from IGM so they could get a direct stake in it. That's how it ended up being in two places. I know that's not your question, but it was done. We didn't try to complicate things. We didn't set out to complicate it, but we ended up with it in two places. I think we will wait and see. With respect to Wealthsimple, we've kept our optionality open in answer to questions that you and others have had as to where do we go with it in the future. We own, after having put in CAD 300 million and taken CAD 500 million back between ourselves and IGM, we own between 43%-48% of the equity of Wealthsimple, depending on how the options of management play out over the next few years. They've got condition-based options. We're still, you know, the very large and significant shareholder. How do we, what do we do with respect to Wealthsimple in the future? Do we continue to grow and be a major shareholder? Do we let others fund it? We're not making those decisions today. You know, we'll make them in the future as the business unfolds. We don't need to, why not keep our options open. We will keep our options open. We're delighted with what's happened so far, but we're gonna keep our options open. I don't think in the short term we would have as a high focus trying to concentrate it in one place or the other. I think we'll wait on that one to see how it plays out and ultimately decide where our position resides. So that's not kind of if I look at things that we'd be working on in the next 12 months or so, that's not gonna be high on the focus unless there's some event at Wealthsimple that would bring it into focus, but I don't anticipate that at this point. I wanna go more broadly on your simplification point, because I think just to say it's got two dimensions in my mind. One is where we have complications, we get rid of the complications. That, the examples of that would be, you know, Power Corp and Power Financial, two holding companies. GBL Pargesa, two holding companies. ChinaAMC in two places. In some ways, you know, the ownership of Great-West Life, which through the transaction for CLIC, IGM, you know, took a step in terms of their own simplification in the groups by using that to help finance that acquisition and get more Great-West Life up at Power Corp. That's structural simplification. The second piece of simplification is what we actually are. Power Corp has historically through our diversification strategy owned many different businesses at Power Corp itself, and none of them in particular being that material or meaningful. Therefore, when investors look at that, they don't know how to value them. They don't really know which part of the business is meaningful, and therefore, it becomes complicated to even understand who we are. That part of the strategy is also simplification, and that is raising capital in a smart way from the standalone businesses and ultimately disposing of those businesses, and getting Power Corp simplified into being a profitable asset manager with some seed capital that's supporting it. That's simplification of what we are at Power Corp, which is not necessarily structural, but is in terms of what our portfolio is. I'm sorry I went beyond your question to make a more general comment. We think about simplification in two ways. Yeah, that's good. Just to when you did the bit of the history here on Wealthsimple, I think you mentioned that, I think it was started off as a fintech strategy at Power Financial, and then as it started to grow, it seemed like you started thinking there's distribution opportunities at IGM with Wealthsimple. Has that ever materialized? I didn't mean it from a context of necessarily synergies, although there are synergies already that you know, Mackenzie is getting, has got some, is providing some products into Wealthsimple. I think if you go to the IGM material and talk to IGM management, they've been talking about some of the flows that they've got in providing some products on that shelf, and it's in the form of ETFs. So there is that synergy, but I didn't really mean it that way. What I meant is when you think about IGM, we are in the wealth management business in Canada at IGM through IG Wealth, the traditional business. We're in that business through IPC, which is kind of a window onto the, you know, a different part of the distribution chain. To the extent that Wealthsimple is becoming a financial services brand and a stop for a large part of the Canadian population, it becomes a distribution brand in the Canadian market. Where does that best belong under the scenario where we own it for a long time and it becomes, and I think it will become a very successful business, management's doing a great job. Where would we own that? I think over time, it's part of your first question. If that ends up being something as real as it looks like it could be and we own it for a long time, we probably wouldn't keep it in two places over time. We'd look to put it in one place. IGM, our thinking in the subsequent rounds with IGM is a more logical place for that than Power Corp. That's just kind of sharing how we thought about it. I hope that helps. Oh, yeah, that's helpful. It sounds like it, in terms of anything with Wealthsimple, doesn't sound like it's something that's necessarily in the near term, but, as Power evolves, we'll see where Wealthsimple takes us. Is that a good way of summarizing it? It is, and the only asterisk I would put on your comment is, Wealthsimple's never sitting around doing nothing for long. They have a very- Yeah Active management team. They got active shareholders. I sit here saying, "Well, I don't see anything, you know, in the near term in terms of our agenda." You know, like, we could be here next quarter talking about something because they are Michael Katchen and the team and the board are always looking at doing things. I just want to put that little asterisk on your comment. I was gonna say, that I think the phrase is how Power evolves. It's more how Wealthsimple evolves. Exactly. That's it. Okay. Yeah. Thanks, then. Great. Once again, as a reminder, to ask a question, you may press star one on your telephone keypad. Again, you may press star one now. Do we have other operators in the? Your last- No, go ahead. Go ahead, operator. Sorry. Thank you, sir. Your last question is from Jaeme Gloyn with National Bank. Your line is open. Yeah, thanks. Good morning. Morning. Morning. First question, just on the impairment in the project under construction in Power Sustainable Energy. Could you give us a little bit more color as to what drove that impairment specifically? Yeah. That was, you know, COVID has hit many industrials and through the supply chain. That in particular, you know, wind turbines have to be manufactured and we don't have any capacity to manufacture that type of equipment in Canada. It's usually the Germans or the Chinese who are manufacturing that type of equipment. There's been construction delays that have been basically due to the turbines and also the repricing of turbines. The other thing is you'll probably know that the carbon tax rebate or credits, I should say, in that industry have been undergoing a change. I think the federal government had put out CAD 170 per ton, sort of high watermark. I think the industry has probably settled on something that's quite a bit south of that, you know, probably CAD 110, CAD 120. Most of the big purchasers of those credits, you know, it's not a big group of companies in Canada. You know, the pricing on that is not, I would say, a fluid market. It is one that is dominated by just a few people. There's a lot of volatility. We took a bit of a mark on that for that reason as well too. That was just in general, some of the reasons for the mark at this time. Okay. Fair enough. Did that mark also factor in any of the recent developments in Russia-Ukraine and the disruptions that might create as well on supply chains and this market or even in other markets as well that could cause an impairment? Yeah, no, it was not a forward-looking mark. It was for events that have happened and that we really have line of sight on. I don't think, you know, there's anything direct with respect to those events in Europe that would affect the manufacturing of ours other than generally inflation. I think, if I can, I'll digress on your question there, Jaeme. You know, one of the things that we didn't say in the call was that, you know, we do not have a lot of exposure to either Russia or to the Ukraine in our portfolio. It's de minimis. We have gone through an exercise of looking at all the portfolios in the group. I just share that with you as well. Okay. Appreciate it. You decided this quarter to pull out the Sagard private wealth platform, seemed to be generating some losses. What was the thought process and purpose of pulling out that platform and disclosures? Well, I might say, just general transparency. It's, as you know, not a large operation. It's Grayhawk. So that's the firm you're talking about based in Calgary. High net worth firm that has got a wonderful product. I'm a client, by the way, so I wanted to make sure that those guys are doing a good job, so I made sure that they got disclosure in the- Correct in the MD&A. That's called humor, Jaeme. No, but also, you know, it is different, right? We have alternative asset management businesses that are running money for clients. There's a distribution business that Sagard purchased, which is a window into the high net worth market, family office market, and that market purchases a lot of alternative asset management businesses. It is a, it's got a link and a synergy. It's a distribution outlet for product and a window into a market, but it's not an alternative asset management business in and of itself. It's at a stage where it's, you know, it has not got a lot of scale to it right now. I think pulling it out separates its profitability from the core asset management business. That was the answer that Greg intended to give you, as opposed to saying he was a client. Yeah. Okay, I appreciate that, Greg. Does it speak to any retrench for the future or, like any other plans? Like it pulled out, should I be thinking about this in a larger scale down the road? Or, was it really just to clean up the asset management side of the disclosure? I think it was for good disclosure. I won't comment on, you know, what we might do in the future, how big it might become or not. I think that would be speculative at this point. Definitional purposes only, just to make sure that it was clear. Okay. Last one for me then, just around third-party capital raising initiatives, six funds in process today. Portage Three, I think is done. But, what I'm curious to learn is in a blue sky, you know, what would a good year in terms of third-party capital raising look like for Sagard and Power Sustainable on its alternative asset side? We did CAD 4.2 billion last year. Like, what would a good year look like in 2022? Yeah. Without being evasive, CAD 4.2 billion was a good year. The platforms are now bigger and they have more products they're launching. Over time, we would hope to have the fundraising total continue to grow off that CAD 4.2 billion. But where I wanna hesitate on what you 'cause you put 2022 in your question. In any given year, it's hard to predict what the number is gonna be, and fundraising is always specific to what the environment is. That's why I made some comments that the environment's got more risk in it right now. People are being more cautious. Technology in and of itself, the sector is getting beaten up a little bit. I just had a note of caution. I would think we'd hope that 4 would grow every year as the platform grows. I don't wanna get into what 2022 will look like, and we have a lot of risk around in the environment right now. That's, I think, the most complete way I can answer the question. Right. Fair enough. What's on the books so far, if I can ask that? You mean committed? Yes. Everything that's committed is on the books. I beg your pardon? What's been locked in so far in terms of fundraising in 2022? There's the Portage Ventres III, I think is. It's 19.2 that you saw. When we have committed on that page, I think it was 17, I can't remember in the deck here. We had funded, and then we have committed and funded. You know, so that difference between the 19 and the 14 is what has been committed by investors that has not yet been put to work. There's nothing else committed. That there's people out there, you know, talking about doing additional fundraisings, but that's all that's committed. Is that correct? Anything to add to that, Greg? Yeah. Yeah. Nothing to add to that. Okay. Thanks very much. Great. Thank you. There are no additional questions at this time. I will now hand the conference back over to Mr. Orr for final comments. Okay, great. I have no final comments other than to thank everybody for their participation and wish everybody a good day. Thanks very much. Bye-bye now. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect. Stay safe and well.