A luxury hotel in Toronto was set to fill on Monday, September 14 with sovereign wealth fund officials and finance chiefs, all there to hear one man make a sales pitch for his country. Prime minister Mark Carney’s two-day summit drew more than 100 global investors overseeing more than C$100tn (US$72tn; £53tn).
The names on the guest list: delegates from sovereign wealth funds including the United Arab Emirates and Norway, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Blackstone president Jon Gray. Carney opened with a private dinner and was due to give a keynote the next morning. Stephen Harper, the former prime minister who appointed Carney to lead the Bank of Canada, closed the conference.
At a gala the Sunday before, Carney said the investors “will come to ‘peer into our shop window’ because the world is looking at Canada differently.”
Old friends in the room
The plan was to use roughly 24 hours to sell energy and resources, and political stability, in the hope of drawing money into AI, defence, transportation and infrastructure projects. Carney calls the broader goal a “more independent, more resilient economy” after a tariff war with the US that has escalated in recent weeks.
His address book is the asset. “These were personal invites in many cases, literally,” said Goldy Hyder, president and chief executive of the Business Council of Canada. “It’s not a group of politicians inviting financiers, it’s a group of former financiers and investment people inviting their former buddies.”
Miville Tremblay, who worked with Carney for several years at the Bank of Canada and watched him in the 2008 financial crisis, was blunter. “He was way above everyone. He understands finance very deeply. [He] would know when they are bluffing and when the understatement meant that something really bad was happening.” Carney began his career at Goldman Sachs.
The American problem
The summit came a little over 18 months after Carney called Canada’s relationship with the United States, built on more than a century of close economic and military cooperation, “over.” Trade talks collapsed, tariffs went back and forth, and Donald Trump talked of making Canada a “51st state.”
That changes the pitch. For 25 years, Tremblay said, trade ministers told foreign investors to “invest in Canada because you’ve got an easy access to the US market.” That line, he said, no longer works. Bradley Saunders, North America economist at Capital Economics, said securing the trade deal was the “really important thing” for Carney in the longer term. Canada also stands to lose the most from any permanent break with the world’s largest economy.
There was also a warning from a co-host. A recent report by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board said the scale and depth of investible opportunity is the country’s greatest weakness. “Global capital is looking for opportunity, but opportunity alone does not make a market investible,” said Naomi Powell of the CPP Investments Insight Institute. Canada’s record of lengthy project approvals does not help, and nobody expected the investors to be an easy sell.
