Big Tech goes Maple
Canada’s corporate bond market just had its biggest half-year on record, and it wasn’t Canadian companies driving it. According to London Stock Exchange Group data, corporate issuance hit $84.5 billion in H1 2026, up 70% from H1 2025. Alphabet and Amazon alone accounted for roughly 27% of it. Both deals were part of a broader “maple bond” boom, Canadian-dollar debt issued in Canada by foreign borrowers, that reached a record $34 billion for the year.
The headline deal: Amazon raised $14 billion on June 9, the largest corporate bond ever sold in Canada. The offering ran across five tranches from 2029 to 2056, with around $28 billion in orders chasing it. That broke a record Alphabet had set a month earlier at $8.5 billion. This week, IBM returned to the Canadian market for the first time since 2012 with a $2.75 billion deal.
The obvious question is why U.S. tech companies are borrowing in loonies: it’s simply cheaper to borrow in Canada than in the U.S. right now. That gap traces to the policy-rate spread between the Bank of Canada and the Federal Reserve. Issuers sell Canadian-dollar debt, swap the proceeds back into USD, and land a lower all-in cost than a straight USD bond of equal size and credit quality. Diversifying away from concentrated USD funding adds a second motive. The 2025 inclusion of maple bonds in the FTSE Canada Universe Bond Index has further deepened demand from passive and benchmark-driven investors.
For Canadian investors, the appeal is diversification. Our corporate bond market has long been dominated by banks, provinces, and infrastructure names, each tied to a different piece of the same domestic cycle: rates, housing, fiscal conditions, energy. Maple bonds break that pattern. Their credit risk is driven by conditions outside Canada, not the domestic cycle, without currency conversion.
This wave of issuance is concentrated in the high investment grade segment of the market, and it’s the one part where spreads have started to move, even as corporate spreads broadly sit near record lows. That’s a signal: the cheapening isn’t happening in riskier credit, it’s happening in the highest-quality names in the market, largely because of how much new supply just landed at once. A patient buyer gets paid for sitting through the indigestion, not for taking on more risk.
“This means that” the corporate bond market is becoming more diversified, competitive, and liquid. We expect both maple and domestic issuance to keep growing, even as some domestic issuers brace for crowding-out risk from the mega-deals. Concentrated issuance and stretched valuations remain risks worth watching. We intend to add exposure deliberately, patiently, and inside the risk parameters that guides our fixed income mandate.
National Instrument 31-103 requires registered firms to disclose information that a reasonable investor would expect to know, including any material conflicts with the firm or its representatives. Doug Johnson and/or Pathfinder Asset Management Limited are an insider of companies periodically mentioned in this report. Please visit www.paml.ca for full disclosures.
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