For two days in Toronto, roughly 250 of the world’s most powerful financial executives — collectively overseeing something like $120-trillion in assets — filed through the Four Seasons hotel and a rotating cast of roughly 80 side events, from a Milken Institute forum in Yorkville to a CVCA gathering on the waterfront. Prime Minister Mark Carney called it the launch of “the investment supercycle that the country needs.” Blackstone president Jon Gray called Canada “a bit of a sleeping giant, economically.” Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing called Ottawa’s effort “heroic” — before adding that Germany would try to top it at its own summit next month. The applause was real. Whether it converts into shovels in the ground is the question that hung over every panel, every private dinner, and every hallway conversation.
A Very Expensive Show of Confidence
The scale of the guest list was the point. Attendees included BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, whose firm manages US$15.3-trillion; Blackstone’s Jon Gray, who oversees US$1.3-trillion; Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan; APG Group CEO Annette Mosman, who runs the €639-billion Dutch pension giant; and executives from Singapore’s roughly US$400-billion Temasek. Canada’s own pension heavyweights, including CPPIB — co-organizer of the summit alongside Carney, and steward of $864-billion in assets — helped assemble the room. As Globe reporter James Bradshaw described it, the goal wasn’t to convince a G7 country’s existence to sophisticated global capital, but to let power players “break bread” in person, on the theory that relationships seeded this week might eventually make it back to investment committees. Novacap’s David Lewin called the event “a massive catalyst,” arguing that even smaller Canadian funds could ride the “ripple effects” of the big-ticket announcements.
Carney’s own framing was explicit: he told The Globe he is trying to attract $1-trillion of investment over five years to reduce Canada’s economic dependence on an increasingly protectionist United States. “You need capital, you need deals, you need projects, you need the proper regulatory environment, you need a competitive tax environment, and you need ambition and action,” he said, adding that Canada hasn’t come close to realizing its potential in Europe and Asia.
The Fine Print: What Ottawa Actually Offered
Behind the atmospherics, the federal government tried to answer the money’s most persistent complaint — regulatory and tax uncertainty — with concrete measures. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced new “advance tax rulings” for investments of $1-billion or more, giving investors a binding decision on how Canadian tax law will apply before they commit capital. “The tone at the top matters a lot,” Champagne told reporters, saying Carney understands that “the time to market really matters.” The summit also became the venue to unveil an expanded, upfront “mega deduction” on investment costs and to launch a process opening the door to private investment in Canada’s four largest airports — Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary.
Those measures build on the Major Projects Office, created under Carney in August 2025 to fast-track proposals deemed in the national interest. TD Securities’ Tim Wiggan called the MPO “just one piece of the puzzle,” arguing that fixing Canada’s investment climate will take “all hands on the board,” not a single policy lever. TMX Group CEO John McKenzie pushed further, calling for reform of capital-gains and capital-cost-allowance tax treatment, and for retooled savings programs to get ordinary Canadians investing alongside the big funds — “that’s what you want to do if you’re rallying the country,” he said.
The Execution Problem
For all the enthusiasm, the money people kept returning to one blunt message: Canada doesn’t have a capital shortage, it has a delivery problem. At the Milken Institute’s Toronto conference held the day before the main summit, Fitch Ratings’ global analytical head Jeremy Carter put it starkly: “The difficulty of building stuff in Canada is the reason that you’re not seeing it, rather than the absence of capital.” He noted that regulatory uncertainty carries far more binary risk than the technical or market uncertainty companies are used to managing — it’s simply easier to kill a project in Canada than almost anywhere else.
The numbers back him up. Organizers circulated more than 160 potential investment projects to summit guests — but only 15 were rated “shovel-ready” or “fully permitted.” Most of the prospectus consisted of energy and mining ventures, though it also included multibillion-dollar data-centre proposals in Saint John, N.B., and Redcliff, Alta. RBC CEO Dave McKay said foreign investors have underinvested in Canada for more than a decade because of the difficulty getting projects to market, though he sees that shifting as investors chase data-centre capacity — partly because U.S. states like New York have started blocking new builds over power and water strain. “Investors need confidence we’re going to get stuff done because the time value of money is really important,” McKay said. “They don’t have time to waste. There are other opportunities to move on to.” Fink was even more direct: BlackRock has “historically been challenged in finding deals within Canada itself,” he said, though he added that if Carney and Canadian executives deliver on what was promised, “Canada will be a large beneficiary” even in a capital-constrained world.
Beijing in the Room
One of the summit’s quieter but more consequential storylines was the presence of Chinese state-backed capital. Both China Investment Corp — Beijing’s sovereign wealth fund, managing roughly US$1.6-trillion — and China International Capital Corp, about 40-per-cent owned by a CIC subsidiary, attended, alongside the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The Prime Minister’s Office said Chinese investors would face the same federal foreign-investment rules as anyone else. But the symbolism was hard to miss: it marked a clear thaw after years in which Justin Trudeau’s government blocked Chinese takeovers, including the 2018 rejection of a bid by China Communications Construction Company for Aecon Group, banned Huawei from wireless infrastructure, and launched a public inquiry into foreign interference.
Former diplomat Michael Kovrig, held in China for nearly three years in what was widely seen as retaliation for the Meng Wanzhou arrest, co-wrote a blog post warning that “once investments materialize, as Canadian projects, provinces and unions feed on Chinese funding, expect growing domestic resistance to any future re-hardening of Canada’s China policy.” Vina Nadjibulla of the Centre for Strategic Statecraft said national-security concerns are especially acute for quantum technology, advanced manufacturing and defence — sectors that appear in Canada’s own investment pitch book. Former ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques went further still, arguing Carney’s talk of mere “recalibration” understates what’s actually happened, and suggesting Canada should even loosen guardrails to let China invest in critical minerals, provided “something like 70 per cent or 80 per cent of the production remains in North America.”
The Backdrop: Trade War, Fed Hikes and Shifting Capital
The summit did not happen in a vacuum. Days later in Strasbourg, Carney urged the European Parliament toward a deeper Canada-EU alliance covering data and computing power, payment systems, defence, energy and critical minerals — a pitch European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen matched by proposing Canada become the EU’s first associate member. President Donald Trump warned that granting Canada that status could be seen as a “hostile act,” underscoring the geopolitical tightrope Carney is walking even as he courts capital that might otherwise flow south.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Federal Reserve, under new chair Kevin Warsh, raised its benchmark rate a quarter point to a range of 3.75 to 4 per cent — its first hike since 2023 — citing a resilient labour market and inflation trends. And Statistics Canada data show Canadian investors sold a record $31-billion in U.S. stocks and equity funds in July, a sharp reversal after buying $78.1-billion worth of U.S. equities in the first half of the year. None of this was engineered by the summit, but it forms the volatile financial and political weather Carney is asking global capital to fly into.
Our Take
What’s striking about the reporting on Carney’s summit is how consistent the message was across dozens of CEOs, from Blackstone to Deutsche Bank to APG: the trust is there, the ambition is noted, and now Canada has to prove it can actually build things. That’s a genuinely different problem than the one Ottawa has spent a decade worrying about. Capital scarcity has an obvious fix — subsidies, tax credits, summits. A structural inability to permit and execute projects is harder, because it runs through provincial jurisdictions, Indigenous consultation processes, environmental review timelines and a federal bureaucracy that, as Camilla Languille of Mubadala noted, currently forces investors to navigate multiple departments and agencies independently.
We think the 15-out-of-160 shovel-ready ratio is the single most telling number to come out of this week, more revealing than the trillion-dollar aggregate AUM figures or the star-studded guest list. It suggests the summit succeeded at the thing conferences are good at — generating goodwill, relationships and headlines — while leaving the far harder policy work of permitting reform largely undone. Christian Sewing’s line that Canada has four months to show “delivery” reads less like praise than a countdown clock, and it’s one Ottawa set for itself.
The China dimension adds a second layer of risk that has nothing to do with execution speed. Inviting sovereign-backed Chinese capital back into the room after years of deliberate distancing may unlock deals, but Kovrig’s warning about political lock-in is worth taking seriously: once provinces, unions and projects come to depend on that capital, walking it back becomes politically costly in a way that simply never inviting it in wouldn’t have been. And doing all of this while Washington explicitly frames closer EU-Canada ties as a potential hostile act, and while Canadian investors are themselves pulling record sums out of U.S. markets, suggests Canada’s capital story right now is less a straight line toward diversification than a genuinely unsettled, three-way tug between Washington, Brussels and Beijing. The summit generated real energy. Whether that energy survives contact with Canada’s permitting system, and with the geopolitics swirling around it, is the story we’ll be watching over the next four months — and beyond.
This is a Commentary piece: analysis and editorial perspective from Canadian Business News, clearly distinguished above from the reported facts it’s based on. It is not financial, investment, or legal advice.
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