Carney pitches Canada to global investors as Trump tries to pull investment south

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TORONTO (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump wants factories and investment moving south to the United States. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is betting he can make billions flow north.

About 300 CEOs and senior executives from some of the world’s biggest investment firms are gathering at the Four Seasons in Yorkville, a tony Toronto enclave of high-end restaurants and designer boutiques, for Carney’s Canada Investment Summit this week.

The investors collectively manage more than $120 trillion in assets, underscoring the scale of capital Carney hopes to tap as Canada tries to attract billions in new investment and reduce its economic dependence on the United States.

“Canada is about so much more than being next to the United States,” Carney said at a news conference last week in Banff, Alberta. “We have what the world wants.”

Carney pointed to Canada’s vast energy and critical-mineral resources, its highly educated workforce and trade agreements that give businesses based in Canada access to roughly 1.5 billion consumers around the world.

He said the turnout showed investors were interested in Canada on its own merits.

“They are coming because of Canada,” he said. “If they wanted to go to the United States, they would go to the United States.”

Few people know this crowd better than Carney. He ran the central banks of Canada and England, spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs and later chaired the boards of Bloomberg L.P. and Brookfield Asset Management, putting him very much in his element among the global investors and money managers gathering at the Four Seasons.

Carney courted that capital Monday in separate meetings with the CEOs of Sydney-based Macquarie Group, whose asset-management arm is the world’s largest infrastructure investment manager, and Singapore state-owned Temasek Holdings, a major global investment company.

A Canadian official described the summit as the largest gathering of investment decision-makers ever assembled in Canada, alongside Canadian CEOs bringing projects at varying stages of readiness. But the official cautioned that the summit is not expected to produce a rush of deals this week, with the most significant results likely to emerge over the next 12 to 18 months. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

But the summit comes at a critical moment for Canada. Trade talks collapsed Aug. 21, and then Trump imposed 50% tariffs on about $20 billion in Canadian goods and Canada retaliated. Washington then raised the stakes again, announcing bans on some Canadian imports and moving to shut Canadian products out of large, long-term U.S. government contracts.

Trump’s tariffs and efforts to shift manufacturing south of the border are undermining what was long one of the country’s biggest attractions to foreign investors: reliable access to the enormous U.S. market under continental free trade.

Asked whether Canada could withstand a prolonged period without a trade deal with Trump, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Ottawa was prepared to support affected businesses and workers.

“We have the wherewithal to support our industries, to support our workers for as long as it takes, with whatever it takes,” Champagne told The Associated Press.

Champagne also noted that Carney has set a goal of doubling Canadian exports to overseas markets over the next decade as Ottawa tries to reduce its dependence on the United States.

The government also said Monday it will give priority to tax rulings for investments of $1 billion or more, giving major investors more certainty before they commit capital.

Dominic Barton, the new chair of Invest in Canada and former global managing partner of McKinsey & Company, told AP that concerns Trump’s trade war would keep investors away from the summit have not materialized.

“People are here,” Barton said. “I haven’t seen an iota of that.”

Barton said Trump’s trade upheaval is forcing Canada to become less dependent on the United States and more ambitious abroad. He recalled former Quebec premier Jean Charest suggesting Canadians might one day “thank Trump” for shaking the country out of its complacency.

“This is a good jolt,” Barton said. “Let’s use it.”

Barton said the U.S. will remain a critical market, with roughly three-quarters of Canadian exports still going south, but argued Canada needs to push much harder into Europe, Asia and other markets.

Carney is urging global investors to look past the trade war and bet on Canada, while pointedly contrasting its rule of law and reliability with an increasingly unpredictable United States under Trump.

Investors will find “a country that respects rule of law and a country that is reliable,” Carney said.

“That combination is pretty rare in the world,” he said. “And it’s an attractive combination.”

Carney sharpened the criticism Sunday, telling Canadian business leaders that Canada’s greatest strength was something “that cannot be found on any balance sheet: trust.”

The summit is aimed at matching global capital — including Canada’s pension funds, which rank among the world’s biggest institutional investors — with major projects in critical minerals, technology, defense, advanced manufacturing and energy.

One major investment was announced Monday. Bell Canada said it will quadruple an AI data-center project already under construction in Saskatchewan, creating a pathway to a 1.2-gigawatt facility and bringing the total estimated capital investment to more than $50 billion Canadian ($36 billion).

Carney called it the largest capital investment in Saskatchewan’s history and said the project would keep Canadian data and computing capacity “on Canadian ground with Canadian power, and Canadian law.”

He said Canada is also working with major global technology companies to develop additional gigawatts of data-center capacity representing hundreds of billions of dollars in additional investment.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and Blackstone President Jon Gray will headline a public discussion on global capital, while former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper is scheduled to close the summit. Carney then heads to Europe, where he will address the European Parliament later in the week as Canada seeks a broader strategic partnership with the EU.