Carney will present Canada’s capital agenda at the first investment summit – National

Prime Minister Mark Carney will convene a number of deep-pocketed investors in Toronto next week in an effort to fix Canada’s “weakness” – a persistent lack of business investment dragging the economy down.

Hundreds of global and domestic investors with trillions of dollars in assets under management will gather at a downtown Toronto hotel on September 14 and 15 for Canada’s first national investment summit.

Carney, cabinet members, prime ministers and other Canadian business leaders will be there with a list of major projects across the country.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she has a list of 34 proposed projects she will pitch to investors at the summit; Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe plans to promote the energy, critical minerals, defense and agriculture sectors in his province.

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt said she would push through several projects including a port expansion, a data center in Lorneville and a power plant rehabilitation project known as the Mactaquac lifetime achievement project.

This investment event was co-hosted by the Prime Minister’s Office with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Public Sector Pension Investments, two of Canada’s largest asset managers.

The summit is, in many ways, a manifestation of the capital-focused agenda Carney laid out 18 months ago when he first took office. Since then, he has reoriented Ottawa’s federal policy and budget framework to channel spending to critical infrastructure and other major projects.

Carney has set what experts consider a lofty goal to “catalyze” $1 trillion in investment in Canada over five years.

Mahmood Nanji, a researcher at Western University’s Ivey School of Business, said Canada has experienced a dearth of business investment over the past decade, resulting in weak productivity and sluggish growth.

“This has been Canada’s Achilles’ heel in recent decades. And this is why I think Prime Minister Carney, once elected, is his biggest bet on rebuilding Canada’s economy,” Nanji said.

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Critics typically blame this lack of investment on regulatory burdens and the long timelines and uncertainties faced in project approvals in Canada.

The Insights branch of the CPP Investment Board published a report Monday surveying 65 of the world’s largest asset managers on how they view Canadian investment opportunities.

While the energy sector stands out globally as Canada’s most attractive investment sector, it also poses the steepest risks. Concerns about policy reversals, regulatory fragmentation and scale or liquidity constraints were most prominent among survey respondents.

The Conservatives point to what they call “anti-development legislation” and levies such as an industrial carbon price as Liberal policies hamper resource extraction and the manufacturing sector.

The CPP survey of asset managers also highlights Canada’s relative strength in the competition for global capital.

Canada ranks well in terms of openness to capital and implementation of the energy transition, and only lags behind Singapore in terms of policy stability and predictability. Nearly 70 percent of investors consider predictability to be very important or essential in making decisions about where they will park their money.

Jeremy Kronick, president and CEO of the CD Howe Institute, said Carney has taken a number of steps to demonstrate that Canada is “open for business” since taking office in March 2025. The major projects office and the One Canadian Economic Act seek to simplify approvals for the country’s development projects, for example.

Kronick says that’s enough to start changing the conversation about Canada as an investment destination. But he suggested there is still more work to be done to address other issues such as interprovincial trade barriers – a type of regulatory barrier that can cause uncertainty about what projects should go ahead.

“I think enough changes have been made. I think the regulatory process is more difficult to change,” Kronick said.

Political opinion has also changed in a way that makes it easier to gain public approval for large projects, Nanji said.

An Angus Reid poll in July showed broad support for building a new pipeline from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia, for example. But large projects like this are also common targets for litigation, and Nanji said officials need to do more to ensure indigenous stakeholders are on board before making too many promises to investors.

“These risks still exist. These risks cannot be eliminated, but these risks are not as big as they were a decade ago,” he said.

There are signs that external capital is starting to pay renewed attention to Canada. Statistics Canada says foreign direct investment will reach $96.8 billion in 2025, the highest level since 2007.

BMO chief economist Doug Porter said most of the inflow of foreign funds so far had come in the form of mergers and acquisitions – not the kind of new investment that organizers of the upcoming summit hope will enable new projects.

The foreign direct investment figures are even more encouraging given the backdrop of the Canada-U.S. trade war, Porter said. He said that, other things being equal, he expects investment inflows to decline due to President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariff agenda, which puts access to US markets at risk.

All the experts who spoke to The Canadian Press said the escalation of the tariff war over the past few weeks will definitely be part of the conversation at the summit. But that might not be a deal breaker.

Summit participants were given a list of possible projects including ports, pipelines and critical mineral extraction. Nanji argues that many of the opportunities open to investors are bringing Canadian goods to markets other than the United States.

“Some investors may be a little nervous about this relationship with the United States… but if some of these projects are going to export goods to other markets, that’s not necessarily a factor in their decision,” he said.

Speaking to reporters at a Liberal cabinet meeting in Banff on Thursday, Carney said his pitch to investors would focus on Canada’s reliability as a supplier in a world full of uncertainty.

“Canada is more than just standing next to the United States, OK? We have what the world wants,” he said.