Canada could unlock $1 trillion in new capital but execution gaps are keeping investors away, new research reveals
Canada could unlock $1 trillion in incremental capital spending over five years and become the G7's top growth economy but only if it changes how it attracts and deploys investment capital.
That’s according to a major new report released by RBC Thought Leadership and McKinsey & Company, Canada's New Capital Playbook, which arrives as global foreign direct investment is concentrating rapidly in a small number of future-shaping sectors.
According to the report, roughly three-quarters of announced greenfield FDI since 2022 has flowed into data centres, semiconductors, electric vehicles and batteries, pharmaceuticals, and enabling industries such as critical minerals and energy.
Canada, the report argues, is well positioned to compete for a larger share of that capital but faces structural hurdles that have historically left it underinvested relative to its potential.
Where the opportunity lies
The report examines five sectors it identifies as the most realistic near-term destinations for foreign capital: liquefied natural gas (LNG), mining, electric vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and data centres.
Each represents a different investment archetype, some anchored to Canada's resource endowment, others driven by cost competitiveness, and others by the clustering of talent and infrastructure.
On data centres, the numbers are striking. Global demand for data centre capacity, measured by energy required, is expected to roughly triple by 2030, growing from approximately 82 gigawatts to 278 gigawatts, according to McKinsey's Data Center Demand Model, with artificial intelligence accounting for approximately 70 per cent of that growth.
Canada's levelized cost to build a data centre is approximately $190 per megawatt hour in Edmonton, compared with $242 per megawatt hour in the United States, according to the report. That cost advantage is driven by low-carbon power, cool climate, and available land; structural assets that don't disappear overnight.
For mining, the opportunity is even more tangible. Global copper demand is forecast to grow from approximately 28,277 thousand metric tonnes in 2025 to 37,357 thousand metric tonnes in 2040 (a 32 per cent increase) while supply is expected to fall short by roughly 9,759 thousand metric tonnes by 2040, according to McKinsey MineSpans data cited in the report.
Canada's mining sector supports approximately 438,000 direct jobs and generates roughly $112 billion in direct GDP, according to Natural Resources Canada, yet the country averages 20.4 years from mineral discovery to production, compared with 13.3 years in Australia, a gap the report identifies as one of the most critical barriers to unlocking what it calls a $2 trillion mining opportunity.
LNG tells a similar story of constrained potential. Global LNG demand is projected to grow by approximately 75 per cent from 2025 levels by 2050, reaching nearly 800 million tonnes annually, according to McKinsey Energy Solutions data.
Canada's west coast sits at one of the lowest levelized cost positions globally for LNG producers shipping to Asia - approximately $7.70 per million British thermal units, compared with $8.60 for U.S. Gulf Coast producers - yet since 2010, Canada built one LNG export facility while the United States built nine.
The capital gap advisors should understand
The backdrop to the report is a picture of Canada as a chronically underinvested economy relative to its endowments.
Canada's capital stock per worker stands at roughly $125,000 - the fourth lowest among peer economies and well below the United States at approximately $337,000 - according to data from Statistics Canada, the World Bank, and McKinsey Global Institute analysis cited in the report.
Domestic capital expenditures stand at 15 per cent of GDP, and on a net basis after depreciation, Canada's investment rate falls to just 1.6 per cent of GDP, among the lowest in its peer group.
What makes this relevant to wealth managers is the direction of Canadian capital flow. Outbound Canadian investment in data centres reached $20 billion in 2025 alone - a figure that nearly equals cumulative inbound data centre investment since 2005, according to fDi Markets data processed by RBC Thought Leadership.
Canadian institutional investors and corporations have been major participants in the global AI and data centre build-out abroad. The report's underlying argument is that some of that domestic capital, if conditions were right, could be redirected home.
As Wealth Professional has reported, foreign capital into Canada reached a near two-decade high in 2025, but the composition of those inflows - heavily weighted toward M&A rather than greenfield investment - tells a more complicated story.
Execution, not strategy, is the constraint
What sets this report apart from prior competitiveness assessments is its emphasis on execution rather than diagnosis.
The authors argue that Canada does not need another competitiveness framework but needs to convert existing policy commitments into investable projects that move capital.
Three priorities emerge. The first is what the report calls "finishing the play" turning announced initiatives, such as the Major Projects Office and the National Energy Corridor Agreement, into visible project wins that investors can point to as evidence of change.
The second is energizing the investment climate through integrated fiscal and regulatory incentives. The third is clearing sector-specific bottlenecks: for data centres, the binding constraint is speed to power; for mining, it is shared corridor infrastructure; for LNG, it is regulatory certainty and stakeholder alignment; and for pharmaceuticals and EVs, it is moving up the value chain rather than competing on subsidies.
The pharmaceutical finding is particularly instructive for advisors following life sciences investment themes. Canada's monoclonal antibody drug substance production costs at $116,000 per kilogram are competitive with Germany and lower than the United States at $135,000 per kilogram, according to McKinsey and S&P Global Market Intelligence analysis.
However, the country's domestic capital participation drops from 42 per cent in early-stage funding rounds to 24 per cent in late-stage rounds, with 75 per cent of exit investors being foreign - meaning Canadian innovation is routinely commercialized elsewhere.
The report was prepared by RBC Thought Leadership under John Stackhouse, Senior Vice-President of the Office of the CEO at Royal Bank of Canada, and McKinsey & Company's Zak Cutler, Senior Partner and Toronto Managing Partner, ahead of the Canada Investment Summit held in Toronto in September 2026.
