Three deals drove more than 90%of IPO proceeds as Apotex carried the first half
Canada's financial sector raised about $376bn across 586 deals in the first half of 2026, up 21.5 percent from the $309.3bn booked a year earlier.
Financial Post Data said the pace could push the market past the $597bn recorded in 2025, the strongest annual total since 2010.
The headline that has gripped dealmakers, though, sits outside those figures: a revival in Canadian initial public offerings that so far rests almost entirely on a single name.
Apotex Health Corp priced its IPO at $24 per share and raised about $1.5bn, the largest Canadian listing since 2021 and, on its own, 59 percent of the $2.53bn raised through IPOs in the country during the first half, Financial Post reported.
Two deals did most of the rest, with agri-food firm AGT Food and Ingredients Inc raising about $449.5m and miner Lumina Metals Corp raising about $421.2m.
Together the three accounted for more than 90 percent of IPO proceeds this year.
That concentration frames the recovery.
The $2.53bn already tops the $1.47bn raised through 11 deals in all of 2025 and the $1.76bn raised across 2022 to 2024 combined, the outlet reported, but the reliance on Apotex signals the rebound has yet to broaden across a wider field of issuers.
The shift in tone has been driven partly by activity abroad.
Desmond Lee, a capital markets lawyer at Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP in Toronto, said big US listings have overshadowed everything else, singling out Space Exploration Technologies Corp, which raised US$85.7bn in June in what Financial Post described as the largest IPO in history.
He said no single IPO in memory had drawn as much coverage as SpaceX, and voiced "hope that some of that enthusiasm will rub off on the Canadian market."
Lee cautioned that the two markets feel different.
"We don't have the companies that have announced their intentions to do an IPO in the AI space," he told the outlet.
More issuers are nonetheless testing or weighing the market, said Jackie Nixon, who heads Canadian equity capital markets at Royal Bank of Canada, calling the trend "great to see."
Equity issuance rose 46.8 percent in the first half to $17.86bn from $12.16bn a year earlier, according to Financial Post Data, well off the 2021 peak of $58.1bn across 861 deals but a clear step up from the slower years that followed.
Nixon attributed the pickup to thematic tailwinds, including Prime Minister Mark Carney's focus on critical minerals and defence.
Materials accounted for 154 of the 239 equity deals and raised about $7.8bn, nearly half the equity total, the outlet reported.
Canada's largest banks did much of the underwriting.
RBC Capital Markets worked on the most deals and raised the most capital at $49bn, or 13 percent of the national total, followed by TD Securities Inc at $35.8bn and BMO Capital Markets at $35.1bn, as per Financial Post Data.
National Bank Financial, CIBC World Markets Inc and Scotia Capital Inc rounded out the group at $34bn, $32.8bn and $30.7bn respectively.
Apotex has traded well since its June 9 debut, sitting about 44 percent above its issue price, with analysts initiating coverage at an average 12-month target of $40.25 and buy ratings across the board, according to Bloomberg data cited by the outlet.
Analysts including TD Cowen's Michael Nedelcovych and Raymond James's Michael Freeman tied their bullish calls to the company's roughly one-quarter share of the Canadian generics market, though Freeman flagged that its growth plans are, in his words, "execution-heavy."
Corporate debt issuance also climbed, reaching $178.9bn across 171 deals from $151.7bn a year earlier, Financial Post reported.
The standout, said Patrick MacDonald, co-head of Canadian debt capital markets at RBC, has been maple bonds, or money raised in Canada by foreign issuers.
Amazon.com Inc's $14bn offering and Alphabet Inc's $8.5bn deal rank as the two largest corporate bond transactions in Canadian market history, MacDonald said, with $35.8bn issued by 15 companies so far, more than double the $15.8bn raised in 2025.
The debt market took time to find its footing.
"We had some months, for example, of almost no new corporate issuance and then over the last couple of months, things have sort of come to a sort of a stability," said Peter Wiazowski, a corporate finance lawyer and partner at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP.
Looking ahead, Nixon pointed to a "growing pipeline of companies across sectors" eyeing the second half, some weighing a US listing as MDA Space Ltd did in March.
Jordan Baimel, financial deals services leader at PwC Canada, said firms are not waiting for perfect conditions.
Out of necessity, issuers have grown more resilient to geopolitical noise, Lee said, pointing to persistent US trade tensions and a stuttering economy.
He said sitting out "only works for so long," and suggested the disruptions "may not be perceived as long-lasting."
