Over two days in September, Prime Minister Mark Carney will try to stanch $1 trillion of foreign investment flight over the last decade.
You can’t fault the man for lack of ambition.
Carney is presiding over what he’s calling the Canada Investment Summit — a gathering of international business leaders, CEOs and institutional investors aimed at recouping the losses over the next five years.
If he pulls it off, it would mark a stunning reversal.
Calling it the “most significant capital exodus in modern Canadian history,” the Royal Bank of Canada reported that over a nine-year period — roughly corresponding to former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s time in office — $2 exited the Canadian economy for every $1 invested, totalling $1 trillion.
Carney clearly wants to turn the page on that particular legacy.
“It’s certainly an ambitious target … and challenging to attain,” Marc Desormeaux, a vice-president with the Business Council of Canada, told Global News.
“(But) there is enthusiasm from the business community to invest in Canada that we haven’t seen in a while.”
A central theme of Carney’s leadership over the last year and a half has been about making Canada more attractive to businesses and investment — creating a Major Projects Office (MPO) to stickhandle files of national significance, reducing regulatory burdens, aggressively seeking out new trade partnerships and jettisoning environmental protections.
Politically, it is a signal that Carney’s Liberals have turned the page on the Trudeau era — or perhaps returned to the “Business Liberal” days of the 1990s and early 2000s.
Economically, the jury is still out. Foreign direct investment reached $96.8 billion in 2025, the highest inflow of capital to the Canadian economy since 2007, but how much of that can be attributed to either Carney’s policies or “open for business” vibes is an open question.
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Amid the ever-present trade dispute with U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, Carney has had some success in trade talks with major economies such as China and India and has made inroads with non-traditional partners like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
He’s also moved to strengthen Canada’s economic ties to the European Union. Carney’s recent trip to the G7 in France highlighted $5 billion in partnerships between Canadian companies and firms in Germany, Japan, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Portugal.
But those two days in Toronto this September — and what buy-in the government can secure from international investors — should serve as an indicator for how high Canada’s stock is with international investors.
Less than two months before the summit, it’s not clear how many have accepted Carney’s invitation. A spokesperson for International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu told Global News in a statement that the government could not yet say how many attendees had confirmed, but that “interest is strong” and Sidhu has been “actively engaging” international investors.
The government’s renewed focus on investment and economic growth appears to be matching the mood of the electorate.
The latest numbers from Abacus Data this month showed that Canadians’ top-of-mind concern remains overwhelmingly the cost of living (64 per cent). The poll, which surveyed 4,205 Canadians online from July 9 to 16, had Carney’s Liberals maintaining a seven-percentage-point lead over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party.
All that’s to say that Carney does not appear to be paying a political price for abruptly shifting Liberal policies and tone. The same voters who supported the Liberals’ Trudeau-era environmental protections appear happy to support a Carney government that does pipeline deals with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith.
But the Carney government’s desire to build big and build fast was always heading for some challenges, despite public approval. “Fast” is not typically what the federal government is known for when it comes to greenlighting major projects.
Earlier this month, unnamed sources told the Financial Times that the MPO told UAE officials looking to invest $70 billion into Canada that it was “too soon” to inject capital into the projects.
Set up just months after last year’s general election as a “single point of contact” for projects of national significance, the MPO aimed to shepherd those projects through government regulations and approvals to get them completed “faster, responsibly and sustainably, while respecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and protecting the environment.”
Projects like major liquefied natural gas facilities in B.C., critical minerals mines and significant infrastructure expansions have been referred to the MPO in its first year of operation.
Carney lured Dawn Farrell, the well-respected former CEO of Trans Mountain Corporation and TransAlta, to serve as the MPO’s first chief executive. In its first year, the Liberals referred a total of 24 initiatives — 17 projects and seven “transformative strategies” — to the MPO.
They call them “major projects” for a reason. Valued in the billions of dollars, they are complex, cross-jurisdictional, and are longer-term wagers.
Investors, like the attendees at this September’s summit, would then be able to make decisions on these multi-billion-dollar projects faster without worry that they’d be tied up in years of red tape.
Robert “RJ” Johnson, the director of the University of Calgary’s Energy and Natural Resources Policy branch, said an assessment of the MPO’s effectiveness would be premature at this point.
“The MPO did sort of symbolize (change)” in Carney’s approach to industry, Johnson said.
“In terms of where we are in that change, if it were a baseball game, we’d be in the third or fourth inning.”
Johnson said that the MPO should be considered among a suite of policy changes Carney and his team have made since coming to office, which, taken together, signal a friendlier environment for business investment than past governments.
Desormeaux cautions that there’s always a “lag” between when an announcement is made and when it makes a measurable difference in hard numbers, making it difficult to assess how successful Carney’s push has been.
“The early indicators of positive moves in the right direction are these announcements from companies and these pledges to invest more in Canada, because that really does represent a change in tone and a change in our prospects over the longer run,” Desormeaux said.
Whether the tone has changed to the tune of $5 trillion in new investment remains to be seen this September.
