The Decibel - The next step in Carney’s invest-in-Canada plan

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

The big sell is on. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has promised to raise $500-billion dollars of private investment over the next five years to reposition Canada as an important player in international business. The goal is to capture billions in foreign investments by selling, in Carney’s words, “what the world wants” – energy, critical minerals and an educated workforce. And a government-led summit this year to bring wealthy investors to Canadian soil will be the site of their biggest sales pitches yet. James Bradshaw, The Globe’s Institutional Investing reporter, explains why Canada craves foreign investment, how those funds could help the economy and whether Carney and other Canadian leaders can woo billions in business. 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.

Prime Minister Mark Carney posted one of his speaking-to-camera videos on YouTube over the weekend to reassure Canadians about the road ahead. He called it forward guidance. It was designed to assure people that however difficult the situation seemed on any given day, that we were acting, and importantly that we would continue to act with overwhelming force against our problems until they were solved. But buried in this video was a pitch not for the Canadian. watching, but for the rest of the world.

It was Carney's pitch to foreign investors about the value of our country. Because Canada has what the world wants, from energy to education. We have the values to which most of the world aspires. And we're a reliable partner in a world that is anything but. For the last year, Carney has been traveling all over the world to make this pitch. And later this year, he's going to bring it home at something called the Canada Investors summit. The Prime Minister will be hosting it with some senior government leaders and two of Canada's biggest pension plans. James Bradshaw is the Globe's institutional investing reporter.

He's here to explain what could come of a group of wealthy investors congregating in Toronto, how it could actually help Canada, and whether Carney can really deliver on his promise to drum up half a trillion dollars in private investment for the Canadian economy. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, James. Thanks so much for coming back on the show. Hey, Cheryl. Always happy to be here. Thanks. So, James, one of the last times we talked was just after the federal budget came out, where we looked at this number, $500 billion of private investment.

Huge number. And this is what the government was pledging to raise for the Canadian economy over five years. So obviously, this new Canada Investment Summit is meant to help get to that number. But before we get into the summit, I wanted to check in on how much progress has been made on this $500 billion goal. What can Carney show as wins? That was a big pledge. That was a big promise to try and attract half a trillion dollars of new private sector investment to the country. And that's not going to happen overnight or quickly. So it's hard to give him a scorecard on that so far. You wouldn't expect them to have moved the needle a ton so far. There are some early signs.

One of the trips that the Prime Minister took abroad was to the United Arab Emirates, and he came home from that trip with a pledge from the UAE to invest $70 billion in Canada. There was talk of an initial $1 billion investment in a critical minerals company, and $70 billion is nothing to sneeze at. That's a pretty big commitment. We'll see with everything going on in the Gulf, whether that ends up being solid, but for now we'll take them at their word. On that $70 billion number, is that over a year, like how, or over a decade?

That sounds like a big number. They were pledging it over a pretty short timeline, but these things do tend to take time. So it's worth watching to see how quickly it actually materializes. Another signal, which I wrote about just this week, was one of the Canadian pension funds, Omer's, which manages about $145 billion for mostly municipal employees. They were the first fund, their CEO, Blake Hutchison, was the first CEO. one of those big funds to set a hard target to really boost the part of their investment portfolio that is invested in Canada.

And they said they expect to put another $10 billion into Canada over the next five years, over and above what they're already doing, which would take their current 18% allocation in their portfolio that's in Canada up to 25%. So that's a meaningful bump, assuming they get there on that. these are just examples that there are investors that are starting to see more opportunity and starting to see a better environment and better conditions for putting money to work in Canada. But the real proof is going to be in the pudding, I think, at the later end of that five-year span, you would expect a lot of this to start to come through towards the end of that timeline

and not like clicking a light switch right away. Okay, so you mentioned $70 billion and the $10 billion, that's about $80 billion. I want to focus in on the 70 billion from the UAE for a minute. If the UAE does invest 70 billion, how does that trickle down and improve life for individual Canadians? If done right, it can have a really big impact. And the way that works is basically this. When you have investment coming into the country, you have money that builds big and important infrastructure. So think about things like highways or telecom towers or energy power.

pipelines or what have you. You have investment into companies that allows them to get bigger, to expand, to invest in new equipment, to hire more people. And all of that creates more economic activity. Once you get more economic activity, if more people are being hired, they're earning more money, they're spending more. Also, companies are expanding, getting bigger. They're making more revenue. Both those consumers and those companies are making more money. They're going to pay more taxes. That comes back to the Canadian government, gives them more money that they can reinvest in Canada or use to pay down our substantial debt, which is not a bad thing for future generations. So if it works, you bring more money into the country, you create a virtuous cycle that

trickles down. And if you looked at that same federal budget where they made the $500 billion pledge, the government said if they actually do that, it would raise GDP, basically our national economic output by three and a half percent. And it would raise purchasing power for individuals by an average of $1,400. Take those numbers with a grain of salt. Budgets make a lot of promises that aren't always delivered. But that's the idea. Purchasing power goes up. Economic output goes up. And over time, Canadians are just a little bit wealthier because of the investment we made with that capital. Okay. Yeah. So that just shows how it simulates the entire economy here. What about the UAE? Like, what do they get out of this?

And why would they want to invest money in Canada? So the UAE has vast sovereign wealth, a lot of which comes from oil and energy. They have been looking to put money to work all over the world so that they can invest in their own economy and develop it and diversify it, have more industries where they are significant. They've been really interested in things like clean energy in artificial intelligence and everything that comes with that, the infrastructure and the power that it needs, the best. backbone of that new economy. So they're looking for places to put money to work, but they're also looking for places that are reliable and stable and where they believe that they can get a good return on that investment. And that's a relationship that Canada needs to build if they want to tap into that. So that's really what we're looking for is to be one of the countries that is

high on their list or even on their list at all when they think about what to do. with the hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars of sovereign wealth that they have to put to work over the next many years. Okay, so a very good example as to how Canada can attract different countries, foreign investment. And that kind of brings us to this Canada Investment Summit, which is set to happen in Toronto on September 14th and 15th. Right around the time, the city will also be hosting the Toronto International Film Festival. So we're going to have investors in Toronto and we're also have celebrities crawling over the place. It's going to be a very fun time in Toronto. But let's talk about the investors.

Who is on the guest list for this finance party? So invitation letters have gone out to more than 100 CEOs at this point. They haven't disclosed exactly who those are. But it's not particularly hard to figure it out. If you think about the biggest asset managers in the world, think of big U.S. firms like Blackstone or KKR. If you think about the really big sovereign wealth funds, we talked about the UAE. It has the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. You could think about a place like Singapore, which has a very big sovereign wealth fund called GIC.

And you can also think about big pension fund managers. Canada has a lot of really big pension funds itself, but there are huge ones elsewhere in the world in places like Australia that control huge pools of capital. So you could imagine if you went and found the sort of top 100 from those worlds, that's probably who's getting letters here. Those letters went out on the prime minister's letterhead, very deliberate. Why is that deliberate? Because Mark Carney has lived in that world, operated in that world, has credibility, has a reputation as being a serious person, has worked with a lot of those funds and investors before, both as a central banker and at Goldman Sachs and when he was at Brookfield Asset Management. So he is a very known commodity with a lot of credibility in that world. You also mentioned the film festival and that this is going to happen right in the middle of it.

That wasn't an accident. The timing of this event was to come while the film festival is on. There's a lot of star power and buzz in the city. It's going to be on the heels of Toronto hosting some World Cup soccer matches. Also a big international event with a lot of buzz. Canada is trying to show itself off, put its best foot forward. This is intended to be an event and a, you know, a party and a place. place to be of sorts. It's just in this case, the sort of rock stars, the celebrities, are going to be

the managers of very big pools of money who wear dark suits. And it's going to be that kind of a crowd. Okay, a suit party. Okay, sounds fun. Okay. So what do we know about how this event will work? Is it going to be, I don't know, a bunch of panels and fireside chats? What do we know? I think the notion here is that for this to work, you have to get all of these people to agree to come. You've got to get the powerful CEOs in the room. That's what makes it a magnet and that's what makes the discussions worthwhile because these are people who can actually make decisions and move large amounts of money. I also think for it to be successful, it can't just be your average sort of conference trade show saying, you know, rah-rah Canada. It has to be a place where

off in the corridors and the meeting rooms and the hotels and the cocktail parties, there are a lot of one-on-one meetings happening where people are getting down to brass tax and talking about actual investment opportunities and not just Canada in a broad, vague sense, being a good place to invest, because that's where you will plant a seed that will actually yield something significant down the road. Because the other reason getting all these people together in Toronto matters is that if you really want to attract large-scale investment to Canada, you need to spend the time to build really deep, strong relationships that come from handshakes and FaceTime and building trust over a period of time, it's not enough to send a term sheet for a deal or a project

to an investor in broad who you've never built a strong relationship and say, what do you think? You have to lay the groundwork for that money to flow in future. We'll be right back. Okay, James, so when all these business people get here, what's the pitch. How is Carney going to sell our country to this crowd? So I think it will be in line with what you heard from the prime minister off the top. One of the cornerstones of it is just that in a world that is getting more dangerous and more unpredictable, Canada is seen as a pretty stable, safe, reliable place to invest. There's a lot of talk about how our values align with, you know,

the values of other investors in the world. So I think that will be part of it. You heard the PM say, we have what the world wants. There is going to be a pitch that what the world needs right now is energy, and we are a producer of energy, both traditional energy like oil and gas and also clean energy. Critical minerals will be another big part of it. AI is another piece of the puzzle, both in terms of having innovative companies, think of a company like cohere that are actually producing the models and building the AI, but also the sort of backbone infrastructure.

Do you have computing power? do you have data centers? Do you have the energy to run them? The pitch is going to be that a lot of the things that are the most coveted resources for investment in the world are things that Canada has. And so you should be looking at us. It has to be a destination. And the notion here is really that Canada hasn't always been seen as a big destination for investment. It hasn't always been on the radar. A lot of investors saw Canada not really as a distinct destination for investment. investment on its own, but as part of a North American market, right? We were lumped in with the U.S. And because the U.S. is the largest, biggest, deepest, deepest capital market in the world,

a lot of the investment went there at the end of the day. Now that's starting to turn. It's starting to change a little bit. Investors are starting to see Canada as a destination in its own right, and maybe even a way to diversify their investments, to spread them around so they don't have all their eggs in one or two baskets like the U.S. or like Europe. They mitigate the risks of a world that is changing and alliances that are fraying and so on. And so that's part of the pitch here is just to have Canada seem like we're on the radar and we're a destination and we're a place to look for investment opportunities. And I think the other pitch is going to be that we're still very close to the U.S. We're still linked to the U.S.

We'll see what happens with trade negotiations and U.S.MCA. but we're still seen as a country that's very adjacent to and tied to the U.S. And so it's a place where you can diversify your investments but still have a corridor into the U.S., which is still the big dog in these markets. That's interesting. Okay. So you're close enough to the U.S., but maybe you're a little bit safer in Canada. That's the idea. So let's complicate this a little bit.

We've had you on the show in the fall to talk about investments and how Canada's productivity problem is a deterrent for attracting new investments. has the productivity issue improved at all? So when we talk about productivity, which has been a thorny problem for Canada, what we're really talking about is how much economic output we generate per worker, right? How much is each person getting done? How efficient are we at that? And you want it to rise over time because if it does, standards of living rise with it. And it's been complicated to measure that.

It's hard to tell lately. the big picture is that our productivity levels have basically flatlined since 2021. They haven't really risen or fallen at the same time that U.S. productivity has been rising. The other thing that has complicated the data on productivity is that we haven't had as much immigration as Canada typically does lately. And new immigrants to Canada are also a boost to our productivity overall because they add to the labor force. I would say the bigger barriers rather than productivity that Canada is going to have to convince the world it can do better on are two things. One of them is the environment for doing business here has been seen as tricky as messy, that we had a lot of regulation and overlapping regulation that we weren't particularly quick to approve or grant permits for projects. and also that the business environment around taxes, around regulation, wasn't super stable.

We had governments that would change things on a dime. And when investors want to make a long-term bet on a country, they want to know that the rules aren't suddenly going to change on them. So there's been a lot of good talk from the Carney government about cutting red tape, about getting approvals done faster. They launched the major projects office to try and do major nation-building projects and to kind of coordinate. and fast-track some of those approvals. And there is a real push on that. But I think a lot of investors still want us to show them that it's real, you know, and that it's going to happen.

The other thing Canada has to get over is the notion that we're just not that big. One of the pension funds I talk to a lot will tell you we're 3% of the global investable market. And foreign investors have had the same complaint that domestic investors have had, like our big pension funds, which is sometimes there just aren't all that many big, big ticket opportunities available in Canada. If you're one of these really huge global investors that we're trying to invite to this summit, they're not writing five or $10 million checks. They're writing $100 million, $500 million, $1 billion checks.

And how many of those opportunities have we had to offer? You've got to create a menu of things people are actually interested in and that clear the bar for them in order for them to want to come and put money here. What about the ongoing uncertainty around our trade relationship with the U.S.? Is that an issue for investors? I think it's absolutely an issue. I think part of what makes Canada attractive, as I said, is that we are separate from the United States, but we're highly integrated with them, and we are a corridor for trade

and investment with them. If there's a sense that that's not stable, that that might go away, that the U.S. might decide to tear up our free trade agreement, that would be a major red flag. for a lot of foreign investors. And so I think there is a lingering uncertainty around that and that's seen as a risk. And in any country, an investor will look at what they would call the risk premium, which is how much do I need to get paid to take the risk of investing in this country? And when you're seen as a very safe and stable place, that premium is lower, that price is lower,

and it's much easier to get capital to come in. The inverse is true when you're seen as riskier. So that's definitely a factor that's driving our risk premium up a little bit. And the sooner we can get some clarity on that and reassure investors that our relationship with the U.S. is going to survive all of this and be intact, the better off will be. I mean, clarity is a very difficult thing to come by at this time. You said it. Are we seeing any signs that attitudes toward investing in Canada are changing? Yeah, there are definitely positive signs.

you can talk to a lot of foreign investors, and they will say they are hugely encouraged by the tone, the signals that the Carney government is sending, the commitment that they are showing to making Canada a good place to invest. A couple of examples, I talked a while back with a senior executive at EQT, which is a really big investor based out of Sweden in Europe. and they were on a trip to Canada with the king and queen of Sweden and having some pretty high-level discussions, including with the prime minister, and showing serious interest in doing more in Canada. I talked with a European commissioner just this morning who's in Ottawa this week, visiting with very senior level people in the financial sector in Canada, who said that, yeah, the perception right now is that Canada is a reliable, predictable partner, that it's got values that are very in line with those. of the EU and that there's a lot of optimism that we could do more together. She also caveated it by saying she's not sure that that has translated into actual dollars flowing yet, but that is the hope. There's optimism.

The question now is, will it actually turn into real hard investment? Yeah, well, optimism turn into dollars. That's the question. Yeah. We've been talking a lot about foreign investment in Canada, but what about domestic investment? Like, will this summit also spur Canadian investment firms and pension funds to put more of their money into Canadian assets? That is also the hope. And Canadian pension funds in particular have made encouraging noises about that.

They have all said we would like to do more in Canada. We're, you know, we're very interested in Canada. And to be fair, they like Canadian investments because, A, they've got a bit of a home field advantage. They know the landscape and the companies and the executives and the players here very well. And also they pay pensions in Canadian dollars. So if you don't have to invest in U.S. dollars or euros or another currency and take the risk that currency fluctuations might eat away at some of your investment gains, that's a nice bet for them. When I spoke to Blake Hutchison, the CEO at Omer's, he said all of the pension funds are going to be involved in this summit in September. Two of them, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and PSP investments are co-hosts.

So they're going to be front and center at the table. And I think the idea for them is if you can create a more robust flow of investment dollars in Canada, if you can drum up more major projects that are worthy of investment, and if you can also have a greater range of partners, foreign investors who can come in and invest alongside them, you can also manage the risks of those investments much better. and it gets easier for everybody to get comfortable in making them. So instead of having CPPIB taking some huge investment ticket and all of the risks themselves, you might have CPPIB and Blackstone and GIC in Singapore, each putting money into a deal, each assuming some of the risk, and each doing their own underwriting to say, yeah, this is a good deal, this is worth doing. And everybody gets more comfortable.

So there is the potential, I think, for more partnership and more collaboration in that way that just leads to more investment overall. Okay, more partnership, less currency risk. This seems like it's a good risk premium. It's my new term here. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think you've got that about right. Okay, good. Okay, I have a final question for you, James.

Carney has done this kind of thing before that is gathering institutional investors to rally funds for a cause. So I've been thinking about G fans, which is the acronym for. for his efforts to pull together the finance world to fight climate change back in 2022. We're going back in time here. So this was the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, but that ultimately fell apart. So is it possible that, I don't know, this might just end up being an expensive summit for the finance class? So I think the GFans example is a great one in one sense because it was an example of trying to marshal huge, huge amounts of global capital, trillions of dollars. controlled by an array of investors towards one cause. And it was an example of how hard it can be

to do that, to get everybody on the same page, everybody rowing in the same direction, and to really get dollars flowing where you want them to go. So in that sense, yeah, I think it's a good cautionary tale. On the other hand, I think what the prime minister and Canada are trying to do here is a little bit different. It's an easier pitch to make. This is Canada pitching opportunity saying we have really good things to invest in and a stable climate to do it in. And you can come here and you can make money and you can also reduce the risk you're taking in your global investment portfolio. So come and invest in Canada. And that's a better case to make. It's an easier case to make. I think the hard thing that Prime Minister Mark Carney and his government will start to come up against pretty soon is that

they need to start delivering these projects. They need to start showing that all of the talk is real and is going to turn into an easier regulatory environment, faster approvals, projects getting done. They need to show that that's actually happening. And until we do, you'll always have a little bit of hesitation amongst big investors to go big in Canada. Okay, James, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Pleasure. Thanks, Chau. That was James Bradshaw, who covers institutional investing for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. Our associate producer and intern is Emily Conahan.

Our producers are Madeline White, 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.