While the Toronto International Film Festival dazzles downtown, the inaugural Canada Investment Summit gets underway on Monday at the Four Seasons Hotel in the city’s upscale Yorkville neighbourhood. Like TIFF, it will bring a flood of global A-listers, dealmakers and power brokers to town. Canadian CEOs and political leaders will be pitching 167 projects valued at more than US$425 billion to a roster of global financial heavyweights. Prime Minister Mark Carney is counting on the event to generate a big chunk of the trillion dollars in new investment he hopes to “catalyze” in Canada over the next five years.

Here’s your guide to the Summit.

The pitch

Canada Has What the World Wants: that’s the tagline on the summit’s 66-page prospectus listing all the investment opportunities on offer. Known as the “dealbook,” it’s a kind of program for the event detailing projects across eight sectors: conventional energy, clean energy, minerals and metals, marine and port infrastructure, power and utilities, digital technology, advanced manufacturing and transportation.

The prospectus offers a synopsis of each deal, its key attributes, the capital required, the kind of investment sought (debt, equity, a strategic partnership, etc.) and its current status – some are “fully permitted and shovel-ready,” while others are “pre-feasibility.”

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The smallest one comes from EDM Resources in Halifax, which wants US$25 million to build a lead and zinc mine in Nova Scotia, and the biggest is from the Port of Churchill, which is looking for US$57 billion to transform itself into a year-round logistics and shipping facility with new railway and road connections. In between is everything from Nova Scotia’s Wind West offshore wind project (US$44 billion) to the Prairie Link high-speed rail connection between Edmonton and Calgary ($10.9 billion) to Project Optimism, the effort by Xanadu Quantum Technologies to commercialize a photonic quantum computer ($1.3 billion).

The sales strategy


The key opportunity, organizers say, is that financiers who drive global capital – asset managers, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and the like – are underinvested in Canada. Like an average Canadian with an RRSP, they want to diversify their portfolios and insulate their investments from global disruptions.

The United States has long been the world’s top destination for foreign direct investment (FDI), but as geopolitical and trade risks continue to rise, Canada offers a stable and promising investment destination. As Frank McKenna, deputy chair of TD Securities and a former Canadian ambassador to the U.S., told Be Giant: “Canada is opening itself up for business investment at a scale that nobody else on the planet is right now…. We’ve got an extraordinarily high number of really attractive investible assets, and things are speeding up dramatically.”

The producers

With his enviable global contacts list, Carney is Canada’s lead salesman, but the premiers will be there as well. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, which together manage more than a trillion dollars in assets, are co-hosting.

The deal brokers

A clutch of cabinet ministers and civil servants who built their careers in the private sector negotiating the kinds of big deals Canada is now courting assisted with the guest list and are expected to help guide conversations at the Summit. That group includes former CPPIB and BlackRock executive Mark Wiseman, now Canada’s ambassador to the U.S.; former Caisse de dépôt executive Marc-André Blanchard, now the prime minister’s chief of staff; Clerk of the Privy Council Michael Sabia, the former CEO of both Hydro-Québec and Caisse de dépôt; and Energy Minister Tim Hodgson, a former Goldman Sachs executive. 

Newly announced Invest in Canada CEO Gurinder Grewal is another key player, along with new board chair Dominic Barton, formerly McKinsey’s global managing partner and Canada’s ambassador to China.

The A-listers

Some of the biggest names in international finance are expected at the Four Seasons, including Dilhan Pillay, CEO of Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, a state-owned investment firm with a US$401-billion portfolio; Rachel Elwell, CEO of the U.K.’s Border to Coast Pension Partnership (£120 billion); and Annette Mosman, CEO of Dutch pension manager APG (€639 billion).

The trade war isn’t keeping the Americans away either. U.S. asset-management heavyweights Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, and Jon Gray, president of Blackstone, will be there, along with representatives of Berkshire Hathaway and KKR & Co.

Executives from Australia’s Macquarie Group, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and Mubadala Investment Company, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, will also be at the summit, along with a host of others. The richest person in Africa – Nigerian businessman Aliko Dangote, who just took his namesake petroleum refinery public in the continent’s biggest-ever IPO – will attend. So will Sweden’s Wallenberg family, one of Europe’s wealthiest, which has ownership stakes in Saab, Ericsson and AstraZeneca.

Collectively, investors who oversee nearly $120 trillion in assets are expected to show up. Between the Summit and TIFF, the streets will be choked with black SUVs.

The program

Carney spoke at an opening reception Sunday night, then took a spin down the red carpet at TIFF’s annual Tribute Awards. He will give a keynote dinner speech at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Monday evening, by which time a lot of the deal-making may have already been done. Tuesday will feature a lunchtime speech by John Graham, CEO of the CPPIB, and 45-minute investment sessions led by five designated cabinet ministers: Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Industry Minister Mélanie Joly, Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand, International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu and Canada-U.S. Trade and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc. Former prime minister Stephen Harper will deliver a closing speech.

The counter-protest

No event like this would be complete without a protest. The Many vs The Money counter-summit, featuring Canadian anti-globalization activist Naomi Klein, began Saturday and featured panel discussions and a concert in Toronto’s Grange Park.

A “Crash Carney’s CEO Summit” rally is planned for Monday night; protesters will start at Nathan Phillips Square and then march to the Art Gallery of Ontario for the opening night dinner. The counter summit is jointly organized by the Council of Canadians, 8th Fire Rising and World Beyond War.

The sequel

The Canada Investment Summit is expected to become an annual event. It’s modelled on the Choose France summit, which in June attracted foreign investment pledges totalling €93 billion, and Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative, which will hold its second conference in November 2026.

The spinoffs

A flood of foreign investment could help spark an “investment supercycle” that could last a decade or longer, according to a report last month from TD Economics. It looked at 300 potential projects that could mean more than $1 trillion in new spending over the next 10 years, which could in turn mean an extra $12,000 in real output per capita in Canada.

RBC and McKinsey & Company weighed in with their own report last week arguing for the power of FDI. It placed Canada in a group of 10 middle-power nations – dubbed the Capital 10, or C10 – and noted that they control 43 per cent of global outward foreign investment, which is 40 per cent more than the U.S. and China combined. Canada is particularly well positioned to attract investment in critical infrastructure and technology, they wrote, and with “some changes to its playbook” could see $1 trillion in new capital expenditure in the next five years. That could mean a 10 to 15 per cent increase in per capita GDP and up to 1.4 million direct jobs.