Mark Carney pitches Canada to global investors as 'much more than being next to the United States' and a reliable partner that 'respects rule of law'

Mark Carney is trying to turn a trade fight into a sales pitch. In Toronto this week, about 300 CEOs and senior executives from some of the world’s biggest investment firms are meeting at the Four Seasons in Yorkville for his Canada Investment Summit, with those firms collectively managing more than $120 trillion in assets. The aim is simple enough: bring more capital north, and make Canada less dependent on the United States.

Carney has been blunt about the pitch. Canada, he said recently in Banff, is “so much more than being next to the United States,” and it has resources, talent and trade access that global investors want. He pointed to energy, critical minerals, a well-educated workforce and trade agreements that give Canadian-based businesses access to roughly 1.5 billion consumers. The message is that investors aren’t coming as a consolation prize. They’re coming because Canada is supposed to stand on its own.

That’s a familiar room for Carney. He ran the central banks of Canada and England, spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs, and later chaired Bloomberg L.P. and Brookfield Asset Management. On Monday he met separately with executives from Macquarie Group and Temasek Holdings. A Canadian official called the summit the largest gathering of investment decision-makers ever assembled in Canada, though the official also said the payoff is more likely to show up over the next 12 to 18 months than in a burst of deals this week.

The timing is the point. Trade talks collapsed on Aug. 21, Trump slapped 50% tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian goods, Canada retaliated, and Washington followed with new bans and pressure on long-term U.S. government contracts. That has undercut one of Canada’s old selling points: easy access to the huge U.S. market. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne says Ottawa is ready to back affected businesses and workers for as long as needed, while Carney has set a goal of doubling exports to overseas markets over the next decade.

Monday brought at least one concrete win. Bell Canada said it will quadruple an AI data-center project in Saskatchewan, pushing it toward a 1.2-gigawatt facility and bringing total estimated capital investment to more than $50 billion Canadian. Carney called it the biggest capital investment in Saskatchewan’s history, and tied it to a bigger national argument: keep data and computing power on Canadian ground, under Canadian law.