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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is hosting roughly 300 global investors in Toronto this week, pitching Canada as a bet worth making on its own merits as the trade war with Washington strips away the country’s oldest selling point.
Getting into it: The Canada Investment Summit brought together sovereign wealth funds, pension managers and asset managers who collectively oversee more than $120 trillion. BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Blackstone’s Jon Gray are leading an onstage conversation on global capital, with Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan and representatives from the Saudi, Emirati and Norwegian sovereign funds also attending.
The pitch is that Canada is worth something on its own. “Canada is about so much more than being next to the United States,” Carney said. “We have what the world wants.” His case rests on Canada’s energy and mineral wealth, a skilled labor pool, and free trade deals with 51 countries that open the door to about 1.5 billion consumers. He also cast Canada as the steady option next to an unpredictable US, telling investors they would find “a country that respects rule of law and a country that is reliable,” and telling a room of Canadian executives Sunday that Canada’s biggest asset is something “that cannot be found on any balance sheet: trust.”
The summit is one piece of a larger goal. Carney wants C$1 trillion in new investment within five years, with Ottawa putting up roughly C$280 billion of its own money and incentives as bait for private capital.
Nobody expects major deals this week. Officials say the big payoffs are 12 to 18 months out. The biggest structural obstacle is permitting, where lengthy federal and provincial reviews have stalled Canadian projects for years. To cut the overlap, Carney stood up a Major Projects Office and adopted a “one project, one review” approach, and on Monday, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said investors putting in C$1 billion or more will jump the line for binding tax rulings.
This all comes as Canada’s economy continues to struggle after trade talks with the United States collapsed last month. President Donald Trump then slapped 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian exports, and Canada hit back with tariffs of 15% to 50% on about the same amount of US goods.
