The Decibel - Airports, AI data centres and Carney’s ‘supercycle’ of investment

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

The Canada Investment Summit wrapped after two days of deals and announcements meant to spur more capital in the Canadian economy. This includes the federal government leasing parts of some of the country’s biggest airports and unveiling new tax incentives, and companies doubling down on AI data centres. Prime Minister Mark Carney is hoping that this will create a “supercycle” of investment.Report on Business columnist Andrew Willis explains what the Prime Minister said to him during their interview and what to make of the major announcements from the summit.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey everyone, it's Manika. It's been a while, but I'm done my maternity leave, and I'm back behind the mic for the decibel. I know the rest of the team here has done really excellent work through a particularly busy news year. And I want to specifically thank Cheryl Sutherland for doing a fantastic job in the host chair while I was away. All right, let's get started. By now, you've probably heard about this week's Canada Investment Summit and the flurry of business announcements that came from it. So today, we're going to focus on some of the most important ones. We're talking to Andrew Willis.

He's a columnist with the Globe's report on business. He attended the summit, and on Monday, he interviewed the prime minister. Andrew will tell us what Mark Carney told him about what he's hoping for when it comes to the Canadian economy. And we'll talk about some of the news involving airports and AI data centers and what it means for you. I'm Manica Ramon-Wilms, and this is the decibel. from the Globe and Mail. Andy, thanks so much for being here. Oh, it's thrilled to be here after two days with the Hoypiloi,

the biggest fund managers in the world and all the CEOs in Canada. It's been a week. I really want to know what this summit was like because it sounds like a very posh event. There are a lot of big names here. Of course, you actually were attending it on Tuesday, Andy. So tell me, like, what was it like? What was the vibe? What was the mood?

Well, first of all, this was a party where they had more people who wanted to attend than they had invitations. They were turning down really powerful business. leaders in this country who wanted to be there in the room, wanted to meet with these global investors and weren't allowed. So when you've got a party and not everybody can get in, you know you've thrown a big bash. Yeah, this is an exclusive, exclusive event. It was a very, very exclusive event. I mean, from the global side, you had the biggest money managers in the world. $120 trillion, US dollars of capital was walking around. It was the biggest fund managers

from Germany, from Holland, from Singapore, along with all the big American fund managers. And one of the neat parts of this was all the Americans showed up. even though Donald Trump hates us. So they all still believe in the Canadian story. They're all interested in hearing the Canadian story. And then from the corporate side, the largest mining companies, largest oil and gas companies, a lot of public sector involvement, like the woman who runs OPG, the Ontario power provider, she gave what I thought was a really interesting chat about, look, here's how to get indigenous ownership into businesses.

And, you know, the big banks were all there. It was an optimistic session. But the thing that I want to talk about a lot today is expectations are now sky high. And I'm really curious as to whether this very ambitious prime minister can meet the agenda that he set out because it's going to be tough. Okay. Well, let's talk about that then. So it sounds like a lot of excitement around this summit. But yeah, how is this going to shake out?

I know you talk to a lot of investment executives. And of course, you also talked to Prime Minister Mark Carney. You sat down and interviewed him, Andy. what did he tell you about what he's actually aiming to do with this summit? So Carney gave us access the day before to sort of help him set the agenda. And look, this is very purposeful. They're using the global mail. They're using other publications to tell attendees, look, this is what we want to get done.

It's not just about that $120 trillion that I talked about. They do want massive investments in Canada. The prime minister's goal is over the next five years, a trillion dollars into energy, into infrastructure. What's more important, and this is where Carney went right away in our country. our meeting was the culture change that he's trying to encourage in Canada. He wants to get us off this place where things take a long time to get done or frankly just don't get done at all. He pointed to a specific fund in Singapore. It's called Tamask. Most Canadians have probably never heard of it, but they're the biggest port operator in the world. They are a private fund backed by the Singapore

government. They are one of the biggest airport owners in the world. They own all sorts of infrastructure, you know, electrical grids, all sorts of assets that in Canada are owned by the government or owned by Canadian companies that don't do a particularly effective job because the Canadian companies are oligoplies. So what Carney wants is, yeah, we want your cash, but we want your operating expertise. In boring corporate terms, we want your governance. But what you really want is a global investor with very high expectations who will lean on Canadian companies, say, look, this is what it takes to become global. Here's what you have to do to scale out your business. Here is the opportunity for you in the states, in Europe, in Asia, will help

introduce you in new clients. But again, expectations are now really high and can the Prime Minister deliver. Also, one little aside of our session, so we were in a couple of, you know, somewhat uncomfortable hotel chairs, the kind of chairs that when you get sitting one at a dinner party, you're just like, oh, I'm squirming here. This is when you're interviewing. This is when I was interviewing Carney. They set up these situations and they make us, I think, uncomfortable on purpose. Interesting. Carney never leaned back. He was so forward on his chair.

His body language was he was like a coiled spring on the edge of the chair, using the hands to make points to me. And, you know, I tried to make it a little confrontational. I said, well, how do you deliver that? Well, he said, let's do this and we're doing that. Like he was leaping, almost leaping out of his chair a couple of times. Like he was, he was tingling. This to him was a very big deal, as it should have been. It's a, I think, a marquee event for his whole term as prime minister.

And he was on. It was really fun to tap into his energy. Okay. This is a really fascinating kind of look at Carney and what he's trying to do here, Randy. You mentioned he's focusing on this culture change within Canada. Correct. We're also seeing this phrase like a super cycle of investment kind of being tossed around.

What does the government mean by that? Well, the goal out of all this is to make Canada, you know, currently say in natural gas or oil or number four or number five globally in terms of exports, we want to be number one or number two. We have the resources to do that. We want to be a leader in critical minerals, which we are not right now, despite the fact that the rocks are all on the ground. So this is the investment super cycle.

This is the trillion dollars. This is the virtuous circle of you start producing more natural gas, sending it out through all these new terminals they're building on the Pacific coast. Suddenly you've got these new relationships with Korean companies or Japanese companies who in turn are investing in Canada and in our tech. The other interesting part of this whole debate is it was happening against this backdrop of what the hell is going on in AI. And a lot of Canadian AI companies were either in the audience or up on stage.

And they were basically saying, you know, there is an opportunity here to be in on the ground floor of a business that Canada helped invent. And we could be players here just like the Americans and the Chinese. So anyways, this was about getting enormous amounts of money and enormous amount of expertise behind Canadian technology. And that's that's the super cycle. That's when you, if you can produce some AI leaders, if you can start building data centers, suddenly you're on your front foot in Canada on the industries of tomorrow, not just on mining and energy and all the stuff

that they're wonderful businesses, but they're legacy businesses. And we're going to talk more about AI data centers in a little bit because there was some news about that that came out of this summit. But I just want to kind of back up for a second here, and you look at the broad picture because all of the stuff that you're talking about,

I mean, this is happening in the shadow of what's going on with this trade war with the US, right? Ultimately, that seems like why this summit is happening in the first place. When you talk to Prime Minister Mark Carney, did he talk about President Trump and the trade war and how they factor into his plans for the Canadian economy? So he mentioned President Xi of China several times by name. He did not say Trump's name in a 25, 30 minute conversation. What does that tell you?

That tells me that obviously Trump's the elephant in the room. Like it's not like he's ignoring Trump. And if I had I brought up Trump's name, he would have said it in response. But what he wanted to communicate to me and to the global mail readers is that Canada has a plan. to diversify to Europe. And obviously, right after this summit, Carney was off to Europe to talk about an associate membership in the EU, whatever that means. But the point that he made about China was really interesting.

Because if you think about where our relationship with China has been, we were in a deep freeze under Trudeau for a very good reason. I mean, the Chinese government was holding two Canadians hostage. You can't do business with that government. That's resolved. And Carney made a point of saying to me, look, we now have guardrails in place on our China relationship. We feel we've got understanding around security, around defense, around some issues like intellectual property.

I'd argue that the Chinese are always going to be difficult to deal with on that. And then he said, we have the opportunity now to reboot the relationship. He mentioned specifically agriculture, fertilizer, fish of all things, which I found interesting. He clearly thinks there's a lobster, and I know there is a lobster, a high-end fish market in China that Canada can help serve. So we could send our fish essentially there. sending our lobster and sending our fish to China and then, of course, energy, you know, supplanting the Middle East with oil and with natural gas. And that's already starting to happen. And one of the big ticket items that Carney is trying to fund is this second pipeline to the Pacific coast and then more of these natural gas terminals on the West Coast.

But that was a key point the prime minister wanted to make. Okay, so he was not focusing on Trump, maybe focusing on other opportunities, including China than that sounds like. Exactly right. China and Europe came up much more. And at the same time, he expressed a lot of optimism on rebuilding the U.S. trade relationship. He said it is all the negotiation. We will have a vibrant auto sector in Canada. I'm not quite sure what it's going to look like.

And that's what I got to figure out. But it won't just involve the United States. We'll make autos with the Europeans. We'll make autos with China. We've opened the door to that already. And somehow, he said, we'll eventually get to a good place with the Americans. So, Andy, let's actually talk about some of the news that came out of this summit. because there's a few different things that we're going to hit on today.

The first one is around investment in Canadian airports. Kearney announced this on Tuesday. And third, we will connect Canada even better to itself and to the world. I'm announcing today that we will seek private investment through long-term concessions to operate Canada's four largest airports. So, Andy, help us break this down. What exactly is the government going to be changing when it comes? comes to our large airports.

So those four large airports, that's going west east, that's Vancouver, that's Calgary, that's Toronto and Montreal. This item went into the package we're told, this is our Ottawa Bureau, great reporters in Ottawa say went in very, very late. This was a goodie for this crowd. You have to remember who he's talking to here. These are pension plans, big global managers. I mentioned the guys from Singapore.

They already own airports in many, many countries. So if you fly through an airport in Europe, chances are they've got this business model in that airport called concessions where an outside operator runs the restaurants or runs the retail operations or even run some of the catering that goes to the airlines. Those concessions are actually worth a great deal of money. The ability to sell you booze before you get on a plane, that's huge. And what Carney is saying is we're going to take an approach that's really worked in Europe and Asia, the concessions, and we're going to apply that to Canada. And that'll free up government money. That'll free up money for the government because at the moment, these airports are all operated as Crown Corporation. Yeah, because the current model basically, the air, like the government owns the land, but it's kind of, it's leased essentially to a not-for-profit.

Like in Toronto, the GTAA, Greater Toronto Airport Authority runs the airport. Exactly right. So what Carney is saying is we're going to take apart that structure. We're going to allow concessions. We're going to allow different businesses or even pension plans to run the big portion of the airport, a big portion of the passenger experience. I think it'll be a better passenger experience, but let's be clear, it is not going to get cheaper to go through an airport. If you want to have a meal, if you want to buy a nice sweater, if you want to have a double martini because you don't like flying, that's probably going to get more expensive, but you're probably going to have more choices too. That's certainly the experience in places like Europe.

And the interesting thing for Carney is he made that announcement. And then the next person he sat down with for this fireside chat was the CEO of the PSP pension plan in Montreal, PSP, which in. invest for soldiers and Mounties, they already own seven airports in Puerto Rico and Europe. So they are logical buyers. And the CEO, Deb Arita, said right away, Prime Minister, thanks for putting airports on the block. We are interested. Like you could see that. That's the kind of instant deal, like setting the stage for a deal. That's what Carney was really trying to achieve. He wanted that tension. Like all of a sudden, we didn't even expect airports to be on the agenda. Now, not only are airports up for sale, concessions are up for sale, but there's a buyer

sitting on stage saying, yeah, I'm in, you arrange Calgary right. I will be an investor in Calgary or Pearson or Montreal. So that was fun. I mean, full marks for him. It was good drama. Yeah, I imagine it. It sounds like it. And so basically, parts of our airport then will be leased out to private companies. This is what you're talking about. Prices could go up because those private companies are trying to make their own money here. But the government then is also going to be making money, Andy, right? Because they're going to be leasing parts of these airports. That's the virtuous circle. That's the flip side of what Carney talked about is I can liberate billions of dollars by selling concessions.

That money comes back to the government. I either invested in projects or I reduced your taxes, and we'll talk about that in a second, or I pay down some debt. Government spending is always a black box, but Carney is making it clear that the quid pro quo is I'll sell something here and I'll invest for all Canadians somewhere else. We'll be right back. All right, Andy, I want to ask you about another big announcement that the federal government made at this summit.

And this one is about corporate taxes, specifically something called the mega deduction. And I'm not making that name up. That's actually what it is called. Break this down for us, Andy. What is this mega deduction that they announced? The mega deduction. The reason they have to call it that ridiculous name is like the big slurpy at your corner store is because they use the word super deduction in the last budget.

And Carney actually got a laugh. There's a lot of accounting geeks in these audiences. So he got to laugh and he said it with a smile. So they had the super deduction. Now we have the mega deduction. Okay. So here's how the deduction works. Say you're an oil and gas company and you're building a pipe.

line and you spend $100 million in one year. In the past, you couldn't deduct all that at once. You had to spread it out. But this new mega deduction allows you to take that whole hundred million and knock down your tax bill that year. So it's huge. It is a fundamental change. And the change that's taken place since the last budget is they extended the number of assets, the kind of investments you could make. So before about 15% of capital projects qualified for the super deduction. Well, under the new rules, almost everything a business can do. 65% of business spending would be eligible for the mega deduction. So this is basically reducing the taxes then that an investor would have to pay.

So it's incentivizing investment. It's incentivizing investment by business. It means nothing for consumers. Consumers don't save on their tax bill. But corporations do save on their tax bill. And what Carney is trying to unlock is a Canadian business community that has not put a ton of money into R&D or into new, you know, new equipment. We have trailed in other countries on that front. We haven't invested as much as we should in our businesses.

That's what currently is trying to fix. So the new tax rates in Canada are now much lower than the Americans and about half the OECD, the economic, the global advanced economy. So we have a very competitive tax framework for corporations out of this. And talking to the analysts, you know, the university professors, the accounting types, they said this would probably be the most significant announcement out of the summit. is that corporate Canada just got a really advantageous tax environment. And that drives so much into business decision making. It drives capital spending decisions. It drives the decision on where you hire.

And when you're in a fight with the Americans and suddenly you got a better tax regime than the Americans, that's pretty compelling for international companies. So basically what this is trying to do is it's trying to draw investment to Canada, essentially away from other countries then or instead of that because this would be more favorable than to investors. Yeah, so there's two targets here. First of all, you're telling domestic companies, please invest more in your Canadian operations. So that's, part of the audience here is Canadian CEOs. And secondly, yeah, you're exactly right.

You're telling international companies, you're telling international investors. When you put money in Canada, we're going to take less in tax. Now, there's a cost, right? The finance department has estimates of how much there be supposed to be taking in tax revenue. And that intake just went down for a company, a country rather, that's running big deficits. $36 billion is the estimate of what this tax break will cost the government of Canada over the next five years. So that's the quantum of how much money businesses will record in profits as they invest in Canada. And I imagine some people might be a little concerned about that, right?

Because for the average Canadian, that means the government has less money to spend on other things. That's right. And this is where if things have to work out for Kearney, otherwise he's made a, if you drive more productivity, if you drive more investment and the economy expands, then everybody wins. But if you've decreased the amount of government revenue and the economy doesn't expand or please know we go into a recession, the government's finance has just got a little tighter. So this is a big bet. And these are multi-billion dollar revenue sums that the government's giving up. So you've got to get something in return for that tax concession.

Otherwise, you're going to have to look for other sources of revenue and consumer taxes are the only way to do it. In our last few minutes here, Andy, I do want to touch on another announcement that was majoring the summit. Not all the news came from the government. This one actually came from Bell. And Bell announced that it is quadrupling one of its AI data center developments in Saskatchewan. And this represents a large investment of at least $5 billion. So, Andy, why is Bell doing this? And why now?

Why announce this at the Investment Summit? Sure. So Bell, most of us know them as either the provider of our phone service and our cell phone service or they're the provider of Internet service. So what they're doing here, they've got fiber optic cable all around the country. And they can plug that into data. centers and be a reliable supplier for data centers is they're running the the algorithms that enable AI.

We get into the weeds on this, but there's issues around data sovereignty that Canada wants to keep data about Canadians and AI that involves Canadians. They want to keep that in Canada. So they want to build the centers in Canada. And so there's almost guaranteed demand for data centers in Canada just because of the issues around keeping our stuff out of the hands of the Americans. Tellus is also in this game. They're trying to enable data centers too.

And there is a separate conversation around what is having a big data center in Saskatchewan mean for electricity rates for Saskatchewan citizens. If Scott Moe starts raising electricity rates for the people of Virginia in Saskatoon or a bunch of farmers, he's going to be a lot of trouble. So only provinces that really have a lot of electricity should really be contemplating, signing their utilities up as power providers. The good thing for Canada is most of our province. do have great hydroelectric, really good nuclear power in Ontario, Quebec's got an excess

of power and is building more hydroelectric. We can host data centers without raising consumer rates. So I think it's a great market for Canadians. I recognize some people have this knee-jerk reaction that they don't want to see them in their neighborhoods. It is an issue with considerable controversy and a lot of consumer interest. Yeah, and I think we should address that, right? Because these are massive centers that are being built. They use a lot of energy. And I guess I also I also wonder, too, about, you know, how smart this bet is long term, because we've been hearing a lot in the last few days about concerns and fears of AI and where this is going. AI leaders, of course, calling for a slowdown in this technology. Does this make good business sense for Bell and I guess for our country to be doing this?

I think it does. I think there's no world where we're not using more AI with each passing year. There is a world where we go through a AI bubble, the valuations on these AI companies. I think are way too high. But the inevitability of adoption of AI and a lot of businesses, I think that's something that we want to be a part of. And because we have so much green energy and because these data centers use so much energy, so much water, we're natural hosts of them.

So I think it does all make sense. What I'm seeing is some really smart plans to build these facilities in provinces, especially like Saskatchewan that don't by nature have technology workforces. it's a good way to diversify your economy. And we can do it sensibly and we're not caught up in a frenzy here. Before I let you go here, Andy, let's just take a step back and look at this summit as a whole because we've talked about all these different announcements from the last few days. Of course, these are just announcements, though, right?

These investments and projects are going to take quite a while to actually happen. How effective do you think that the summit has been at the big goal here of actually strengthening Canada's economy? That's the thing that we're going to be trying to measure at the Globe Mail for the next little while. So Carney is part of the preamble of the conference. He put out this menu like of 166 items that you could invest in. Some of them are shovel ready. A lot of them are really big. So if Carney can't get people to buy those menu items over the next year, then he's in trouble.

Like this is a defining moment for Mark Carney's administration. If they can't deliver orders for the things that they've offered to the world, they can't close some deals. If they can't get some investments, then the summit's failed. I don't think that's going to happen. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the room. A lot of these shovel-ready projects, they make sense. They're going to make a lot of money. So I think there will be a lot of announcements over the next 12 months.

But if there's not, then we should be asking, like, what exactly did we go through all of that for? But again, I think we're going to be reporting on a ton of multibillion-dollar deals with global money coming into this country. Andy, it's been so great to have you here. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you. That was Andrew Willis, a columnist for the Globe's report on business. That's it for today. I'm Manika Ramman Wilms.

This episode is mixed by Rachel Levy McLaughlin. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, Rachel Levy McLaughlin, and Mikhail Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.