It depends on how you define small. Over the lifetime of an investor, if you have a one-percentage-point increase in management costs for your investments, that does subtract significantly from the final asset that emerges from your investment at the end of life. If Mr. Coyne is correct that the CPPIB's transaction costs and management fees are up 17 times and 44 times, respectively, those are absolutely astronomical increases.
In fairness, the CPPIB will justify that, given the very high returns they've achieved, so I'm not making a judgment that it wasn't necessarily worth the increased management cost, but if you are going to compare the two options, there's no question that you are right to include the virtues of active investing in that they're able to get a higher return, but ought you not also include the vices of active management in achieving that return, namely, that it is much more expensive to do so?
It seems to me that you did not consider the last part, because you assumed that passive management would have been just as expensive as active management, which I think we agree is not the case.