Over 160 Canadian projects pitched to global asset managers
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is preparing to open a two-day investment summit in Toronto on Monday, pitching more than 160 corporate projects to global asset managers responsible for over $100 trillion in holdings as part of a five-year drive to attract C$1 trillion (US$723 billion) in capital and restructure the Canadian economy.
The Wall Street Journal described the gathering as a matchmaking exercise pairing companies pitching projects with some of the world’s top asset managers. The summit represents what the WSJ called “a high-profile push by Carney to rewire an economy that was struggling prior to the start of President Trump’s second term.” Project fields cover conventional and clean energy, mining, defense manufacturing, and power generation, according to a prospectus prepared for invitees and reviewed by the WSJ.
Carney framed the case for foreign capital in national terms. “Investors attending are coming because of Canada. If they wanted to go to the United States, they go to the United States,” he said. “What they are going to see when they come here is a country that is uniting, that is positive…and a country that respects rule of law and that is reliable—and that combination is pretty rare in the world.”
The summit unfolds against a backdrop of deteriorating trade relations between Canada and the United States. Talks toward a tariff deal collapsed earlier this month, prompting both countries to impose new tariffs and restrictions on cross-border trade. Canada is the United States’ second-largest trading partner, with two-way annual trade of roughly $1 trillion, according to the WSJ.
Canadian economic activity was stagnant for roughly twelve months before recently showing signs of a breakthrough, the WSJ reported, with the disruption stemming from trade uncertainty. Carney’s broader investment push is intended to “build up economic resilience” and reshape a country he said became too reliant and complacent on US trade to drive growth.
Among the firms seeking capital at the summit is Deep Sky, a Montreal-based carbon-removal company pursuing $328 million from strategic investors to build its largest carbon-capture and sequestration facility to date in oil-rich Alberta. Through its existing Alberta facility, Deep Sky has sold carbon credits to Microsoft and other leading financing institutions, said Quentin Servais-Laval, the company’s vice-president of finance.
The summit “will help put infrastructure projects that are shovel-ready in front of investors that have the funds to deploy and are really interested in the opportunity in Canada,” Servais-Laval said, adding that Deep Sky has lined up meetings in Toronto regarding its proposed plant. He described the gathering as “an accelerator.”
A Royal Bank of Canada report, based on analysis of United Nations data, found Canada has attracted nearly 4% of global inward foreign-direct investment—described in the report as “an admirable share for an economy that accounts for 2% of global output.” The same report identified structural barriers to capital formation, including what RBC called an “opaque and shifting regulatory system” that extends project timelines and increases capital costs.
RBC noted that Canadian mining projects average more than 20 years from discovery to production, versus more than 13 years in Australia, and said regulatory delays and uncertainty contributed to the cancellation of eight proposed liquefied-natural-gas projects.
The Carney government has moved to address those concerns, this week scaling back project assessments for oil-and-gas pipelines and natural-gas plants. Officials have framed the changes as part of a broader push to reduce regulatory overlap and accelerate project approval across the sectors featured at the summit.