Canada investment summit opens amid energy sovereignty push

Prime Minister Mark Carney opens Canada's first-ever national investment summit in Toronto on Monday, welcoming hundreds of global executives and asset managers to pitch the country's energy, infrastructure, and critical minerals sectors.

It comes as a new report warns that policy inaction continues to undermine the very ambition the summit is designed to advance.

Carney, members of his cabinet, and premiers from across the country will spend the two-day event pitching investors on opportunities in multiple sectors, including energy, infrastructure, and critical minerals.

The summit is co-hosted with CPP Investments and PSP Investments and is a centrepiece of the prime minister's pledge to stimulate $1 trillion in new capital over the next five years, with the government's materials also citing 27 nation-building initiatives moving through the Major Projects Office, representing more than $192 billion in investment and more than 330,000 jobs.

The pitch and the promise

Speaking to Canadian business leaders at a reception on Sunday evening, Carney said Canada has "the energy, the resources, the talent, the technology and the capital," adding that its "greatest strength is something that cannot be found on any balance sheet: trust."

The Globe and Mail, citing an agenda circulated to attendees, reported roughly 250 financial-sector executives overseeing nearly $120 trillion in assets would participate, with Carney opening the main program on September 15 with a keynote and a fireside chat with Deborah Orida, chief executive of the $321-billion PSP Investments.

Sovereign wealth funds from the United Arab Emirates and Norway's Norges Bank Investment Management were also among the expected attendees, according to reporting by CTV News.

The summit is running against a backdrop of significant capital outflow from Canada.

A report released by Royal Bank of Canada found that Canada suffered a net $1 trillion investment outflow over the last decade, concluding that for every dollar invested in Canada from abroad, two dollars exited.

Energy sovereignty: ambition versus execution

The summit's emphasis on energy as a cornerstone of Canada's investment case arrives alongside a detailed new policy analysis from the Fraser Institute.

The September 2026 report, Strategies to Secure Canadian Energy Sovereignty, authored by Karen Graham, principal of KMG Strategy, and Jock Finlayson, a Fraser Institute Senior Fellow and former Executive Vice President of the Business Council of British Columbia, argues that Canada must urgently shift from aspirational language to concrete policy action if it is to capitalise on its resource endowments.

Canada ranks sixth in overall energy production globally, with a four per cent share of world output as of 2023, according to Natural Resources Canada's Energy Fact Book 2025–2026. The country holds top-tier rankings across uranium, hydroelectricity, crude oil, natural gas, and electricity. Despite that position, the report contends Canada remains structurally exposed.

Canada's energy exports represented 29 per cent of the country's total merchandise exports in 2024, but 89 per cent of the dollar value of those exports went to the United States, a single-market dependency the authors describe as analogous to Europe's reliance on Russia for natural gas before that country's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The authors argue Canada should reframe its national goal from "energy superpowerdom" to the more achievable and geopolitically meaningful concept of "energy sovereignty" - defined as the capacity to diversify export markets, attract both domestic and foreign capital, and streamline regulation so that major projects advance on a competitive timeline.

The report recommends that Canada approve and build new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals on at least two coasts, consolidate its dominant position in uranium exports, grow crude oil export volumes through additional pipeline capacity, and substantially reduce regulatory delays that have historically taken a decade or more to resolve.

Infrastructure deficit and investor opportunity

The Fraser Institute report notes that energy makes up the largest share (30 per cent) of Canada's overall infrastructure, valued at $404 billion in 2024, most of which is funded, constructed, operated, and maintained by the private sector.

Investment patterns in energy infrastructure were largely flat over the 15 years from 2009 to 2023, leaving Canada with a deficit that has become a costly bottleneck for energy exports.

Graham and Finlayson note growing political pressure on Canadian pension funds and financial institutions to participate more actively in building and operating long-life infrastructure assets — a development directly relevant to advisors serving high-net-worth clients and institutional investors with infrastructure mandates.

The report also cites recent analysis by the ARC Energy Research Institute suggesting that capacity limitations on oil exports cost Canada roughly $4 billion annually in foregone government revenues prior to the Trans Mountain expansion.

A recent CPP Investments Insights Institute survey of 65 senior investment professionals across 20 countries, representing approximately $65 trillion in assets under management, found that regulatory efficiency and predictability were cited by 72 per cent of respondents as a key driver of capital allocation decisions, according to Wealth Professional's pre-summit coverage.

Execution remains the test

An afternoon panel at the summit is scheduled to pitch Canada as a stable destination for energy investment from pipelines to nuclear power featuring Ontario Power Generation CEO Nicolle Butcher, Suncor Energy CEO Rich Kruger, and a TC Energy Corp. executive.

Civil society groups have signalled their opposition. Demonstrators, including labour unions, Indigenous leaders, and climate and housing advocates, planned to mobilise on Monday under the banner "The Many vs. The Money," warning against placing Canada's economic future in the hands of CEOs and raising concerns about public services, pipelines, and arms manufacturing.

The Business Council of Canada's position reported in earlier coverage of Carney's trillion-dollar capital push on Wealth Professional, captures what many institutional observers have repeated: the summit is a good opening, but the follow-through on regulation and approvals is what will determine whether Canada converts investor interest into committed capital.

As TD Economics found in its analysis of the nation-building pipeline, energy alone accounts for $363 billion of the estimated $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion in projects queued for the next decade, representing the single largest category of planned investment in Canada.

Whether the regulatory and infrastructure frameworks can keep pace with that ambition remains, as of this week, the open question at the heart of the Toronto summit.