With U.S. tariffs at 50 per cent and import bans two weeks away, Carney gathers investors managing US$120 trillion in Toronto to sell Canada as a rules-based alternative, landing a C$50 billion data-centre commitment on day one
Toronto, September 15, 2026 | Peacock Tariff Consulting Canada Trade Desk
Prime Minister Mark Carney opened the two-day Canada Investment Summit on Monday with a pitch built explicitly on the trade war that has consumed his government since August: Canada, he told roughly 300 of the world’s largest asset managers, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds, is “about so much more than being next to the United States.” The invitation-only gathering at the Four Seasons in Toronto’s Yorkville district is the largest assembly of investment decision-makers ever convened in the country, according to a federal official, and it is the centrepiece of a plan to catalyse C$1 trillion in new investment over five years as Ottawa tries to loosen an economy that until this year sent nearly four-fifths of its exports to a single customer.
The summit lands at a moment of maximum tariff pressure. Since August 22, the United States has applied 50 per cent duties under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 to roughly US$20 billion of Canadian exports. Expanded product lists took effect today. Outright import bans on Canadian packaged alcohol, whey and molasses products and large motorcycles begin September 29. Washington has also moved to strip Canadian goods from U.S. federal procurement schedules worth more than US$50 billion a year. Canada’s own counter-tariffs of 15 to 50 per cent on more than 700 U.S. tariff lines have been in force for a week. Against that backdrop, Carney is asking global capital to bet that Canada can build its way to a less U.S.-dependent economy, and the first day produced at least one commitment large enough to anchor the story: Bell Canada’s decision to quadruple an artificial intelligence data-centre project in Saskatchewan to a total estimated investment above C$50 billion.
Who is in the room
The guest list, as reported by The Globe and Mail and The Associated Press, includes about 250 to 300 senior executives from global firms that collectively oversee close to US$120 trillion in assets, alongside 26 of Canada’s largest institutional investors, including 11 major pension funds, and more than 45 of the country’s most prominent corporations. BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink and Blackstone president Jon Gray headline a public session on global capital. Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper is scheduled to close the summit, a bipartisan signal that Ottawa has been keen to project. Carney held separate meetings Monday with the chief executives of Macquarie Group, whose asset management arm is the world’s largest infrastructure investor, and Temasek Holdings, Singapore’s state investment company.
Provincial premiers are on hand to pitch their own project pipelines, and Dominic Barton, the former McKinsey global managing partner and former ambassador to China whom Carney appointed this month as chair of Invest in Canada, is acting as the summit’s chief salesman. Barton told AP that fears the trade war would keep investors away had not materialized. “People are here,” he said. “I haven’t seen an iota of that.”
The pitch
Carney’s argument has three parts. The first is resources: energy, critical minerals and the infrastructure to move them to markets other than the United States. The second is institutions: a country that, in his words, “respects rule of law and a country that is reliable,” a combination he described as “pretty rare in the world” and “an attractive combination.” The third is market access beyond North America. Through trade agreements with 51 countries, the government said in a statement ahead of the summit, businesses based in Canada have preferential access to roughly 1.5 billion consumers.
“We’re trusted, because we’re reliable and because we have what the world wants,” Carney said Sunday, according to Al Jazeera. “That’s why the world is coming to our door.” Speaking to Canadian business leaders the same evening, he said the country’s greatest strength was something “that cannot be found on any balance sheet: trust.” And in Banff last week, previewing the summit, he made the contrast with Washington explicit: “They are coming because of Canada. If they wanted to go to the United States, they would go to the United States.”
Asked by Bloomberg on Monday whether the mocking tone from the U.S. administration, including AI-generated memes and a move to rename Lake Ontario, could sour the atmosphere at the summit, Carney answered: “Short answer, no,” adding that attendees “are all professionals.”
What is on offer
A prospectus prepared for the summit and reported by Al Jazeera lays out 167 potential investments across energy, mining, ports, transportation, technology and advanced manufacturing, ranging from satellite technology to a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta to the British Columbia coast. The list is heavily weighted toward the resource economy. Vina Nadjibulla, co-founder and chief executive of the Centre for Strategic Statecraft, calculated that minerals and metals alone account for nearly 38 per cent of the projects, and that adding energy and power infrastructure lifts the share to almost 70 per cent. “The summit is fundamentally about financing the physical productive capacity of the Canadian economy,” she told Al Jazeera.
Ottawa’s C$1 trillion target is not a pledge of public money. The government says about C$280 billion in public investment and incentives is intended to crowd in private and institutional capital for the balance. To that end, the government announced Monday that it will give priority to advance tax rulings for investments of C$1 billion or more, a measure designed to give large investors certainty before they commit. Carney’s Major Projects Office and the “one project, one review” approach to federal-provincial permitting are the administrative pillars of the pitch.
The Bell Canada announcement was the day’s marquee deal. The company said it will expand a Saskatchewan AI data-centre project already under construction, creating a path to a 1.2-gigawatt facility and lifting total estimated capital investment to more than C$50 billion. Carney called it the largest capital investment in the province’s history and said the project would keep Canadian data and computing capacity “on Canadian ground with Canadian power, and Canadian law.” He added that Ottawa is working with major global technology companies on additional gigawatts of data-centre capacity representing “hundreds of billions of dollars” in further investment.
The trade war in the room
For all the talk of Canada on its own merits, the tariff dispute is the summit’s organizing fact. Carney told Bloomberg on Monday that the collapse of talks on August 21 had clarified Canada’s “red lines” on sovereignty, culture and its freedom to sign other trade deals, and that he welcomed President Donald Trump’s weekend prediction that a deal could come “fairly soon.” But he coupled that with a warning that Canada is “not going to slow down” on diversification. He flies to France when the summit ends and will address the European Parliament later in the week as Canada pursues a broader strategic partnership with the EU.
Finance Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, asked by AP whether Canada could withstand a prolonged period without a deal, said: “We have the wherewithal to support our industries, to support our workers for as long as it takes, with whatever it takes.” He noted that Carney has set a goal of doubling Canadian exports to overseas markets within a decade.
Barton was blunter about the strategic logic. He told AP that the trade upheaval is forcing Canada to become “less dependent on the United States and more ambitious abroad,” recalling former Quebec premier Jean Charest’s suggestion that Canadians might one day “thank Trump” for shaking the country out of complacency. “This is a good jolt,” Barton said. “Let’s use it.” He acknowledged that the United States will remain a critical market, with roughly three-quarters of exports still heading south, but argued Canada must push “much harder” into Europe and Asia.
The skeptics
Analysts consulted by Al Jazeera drew a sharp distinction between filling a room and filling a project pipeline. Nadjibulla called the turnout “unprecedented and a political win in itself,” but added: “The summit can open doors and create relationships. Success will ultimately depend on how many of those conversations turn into serious investment, financing and projects that actually get built.” She listed what investors will want to see: “a credible pipeline, faster and more predictable permitting, policy stability, clearer revenue models and better coordination across provincial and federal jurisdictions.”
Rachel Ziemba, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, noted that many of the 167 projects are at concept or feasibility stage. “Some are quite large and expensive and are unlikely to be ready for prime time,” she said. Ziemba also pointed to a trade-off inherent in the resource-heavy pipeline: ports, pipelines and mines require enormous capital but “may limit the benefits to Canadians looking to replace the US-integrated sectors,” because they do not generate the same volume of jobs as the manufacturing industries the tariffs are hollowing out. She said she would be watching “how much investors actually commit, the timelines and clarity on who pays.”
The federal official quoted by AP struck a similar note of caution, saying the summit is not expected to produce a rush of deals this week and that the most significant results are likely to emerge over the next 12 to 18 months.
Outside the Four Seasons, labour, Indigenous, housing and climate groups staged a rally under the banner “The Many vs. the Money,” arguing that Canada’s economic future should not be shaped primarily by corporate executives and global investors. NDP leader Avi Lewis accused the prime minister of “selling our airports and our ports and privatising more of our economy to the benefit of foreign investors.”
The economic backdrop
The summit’s optimism sits alongside sobering data. Bloomberg reported Monday that the 50 per cent U.S. tariffs are set to “hammer many small- and medium-sized businesses, including family firms,” that had been largely insulated from the earlier rounds of steel, aluminum and auto tariffs, because the Section 338 lists reach consumer goods, food and beverages. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimates 53,112 businesses are directly hit by U.S. tariffs, Canadian counter-tariffs or both, reporting median added costs of about C$65,000 per month. CFIB’s Corinne Pohlmann has said the government’s support programs, even after recent changes, “continue to exclude about half of the small business community.”
Statistics Canada reported Monday that consumer prices rose 3 per cent year over year in August, matching forecasts. The Bank of Canada faces the awkward combination of tariff-driven price pressure in specific categories and a growth outlook that most bank economists have marked down for the second half of the year. Bilateral trade remains enormous even in its diminished state: U.S. Census Bureau data show Canada exported US$382 billion in goods to the United States in 2025 and imported US$334 billion.
The diversification agenda already has one concrete deliverable. Canada’s January arrangement with China reduced Chinese tariffs on canola seed from 75.8 per cent to 15 per cent and eliminated them on canola meal, peas, lobster and crab through the end of 2026, in exchange for a 49,000-unit quota of Chinese electric vehicles entering Canada at 6.1 per cent rather than 100 per cent. That deal has been a point of friction in the U.S. talks and illustrates the “freedom to sign other trade deals” red line that Carney has said Washington sought to constrain.
Implications for Canadian business
For exporters and importers, the summit is a long-horizon story overlaid on a short-horizon crisis. Nothing announced in Toronto changes the tariffs that took effect today or the import bans arriving September 29. Firms in the directly affected sectors, including alcohol, dairy, furniture, structural metals, powersports and paper, need to manage the next two weeks on the assumption that the measures proceed as written, prioritizing U.S. entries for consumption on banned goods before the deadline and rebuilding landed-cost models for goods that now face stacked Section 232 and Section 338 duties.
The summit matters more for medium-term positioning. If even a fraction of the 167 projects proceeds, demand for Canadian engineering, construction, fabricated metals, electrical equipment and logistics services will rise, and much of it will be domestic demand insulated from U.S. tariff policy. Firms currently losing U.S. sales should be mapping whether their capabilities align with mining, port, pipeline, power and data-centre construction. The Bell Canada expansion alone implies years of procurement for electrical infrastructure, cooling systems and construction services in Saskatchewan.
Trade diversification is also a compliance discipline. Companies seeking to redirect exports to the EU, Indo-Pacific or China need to master rules of origin under CETA, CPTPP and the China arrangement, along with the sanitary, phytosanitary and technical standards regimes of those markets. The federal government’s export doubling target implies expanded Export Development Canada and Trade Commissioner Service support, and exporters should be positioning now to draw on it.
Finally, the summit’s emphasis on tax certainty for large investors highlights a gap for smaller firms. Priority tax rulings for C$1 billion investments and a fast-tracked Major Projects Office are aimed at global capital. The small and medium-sized businesses that CFIB says bear the brunt of the tariff war are looking for something different: direct tariff relief, a faster remission process and broad-based tax cuts. How Ottawa balances those constituencies in the fall budget will determine whether the summit’s investment narrative is felt beyond the resource and technology sectors.
Outlook
Carney’s fireside conversation with Public Sector Pension Investment Board chief executive Deborah Orida opens today’s main program, and Harper closes it. The prime minister then departs for Europe, carrying the same message to Brussels and Strasbourg that he delivered in Toronto: that Canada is a reliable, rules-based partner in a world with fewer of them. Whether that message translates into signed cheques will not be known this week. The federal official’s 12-to-18-month horizon is probably the honest one. But the summit has already achieved its narrower political purpose: on the day new U.S. tariffs took effect and two weeks before U.S. import bans begin, the story out of Canada was about capital coming in rather than exports being shut out.