Carney's pitch to attract foreign investment to Canada

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pitched Canada as a 'safe harbour' for global capital at his Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, drawing roughly 300 executives from firms collectively managing more than C$120 trillion (about $86 trillion), including BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Blackstone President Jon Gray, Apollo CEO Marc Rowan and sovereign wealth fund representatives from Norway, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE and Singapore. Carney, a former central bank governor of both Canada and England who spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs, said Canada offered rule of law, reliability and access to roughly 1.5 billion consumers through its trade agreements, and announced plans to privatize operations at four major Canadian airports to fund transport infrastructure. One major deal emerged immediately: Bell Canada said it would quadruple an AI data-center project in Saskatchewan into a 1.2-gigawatt facility, bringing total planned investment there above C$50 billion ($36 billion), which Carney called the largest capital investment in the province's history.

The summit came amid a collapsed US-Canada trade relationship: talks broke down on August 21, after which Trump imposed 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of Canadian goods, Canada retaliated, and Washington moved to ban some Canadian imports and exclude Canadian firms from major US government contracts. Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said Ottawa was prepared to support affected industries 'for as long as it takes, with whatever it takes,' while Carney set a goal of doubling Canadian exports to non-US markets over the next decade and planned a follow-up trip to address the European Parliament. Officials cautioned the summit itself was unlikely to yield immediate deals, with major results expected over the next 12-18 months, and protesters gathered outside the event's opening gala accusing Carney of a 'great Canadian sell-off' of public assets to largely American investors.