Canada hosted an Investment Summit in mid-September, and the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, private asset managers and equity funds came to see what was on offer. Prime Minister Carney, our present day “Minister of Everything” and lauded as the heir of CD Howe, had set a bold goal of $1 trillion of investments by 2030 in Canada’s major projects to “Build Canada Strong.” A pitch book of some 167 Canadian investment opportunities was distributed, although not publicly released.

The Investment Summit's main achievement turned out to be an ironic refutation of its purported premise: $500 billion in funding for future capital projects, all of it Canadian! 

It remains an open question of how much or what we wanted from the foreign investors. Foreign investment has a place in the Canadian economy, but concentration, strategic location and corporate culture matter. The roughly three dozen US investment banks, companies and funds that attended the summit may well be a Trojan horse that would increase the 46 per cent of foreign direct investment stock already US-owned and exacerbate the vulnerabilities that have been weaponized against Canada in the trade war.

However, the take-away from the early Canadian results of the summit, to paraphrase the prime minister, is that we can provide more for ourselves than anyone can give. The $500 billion of Canadian financial capital pools announced by Canadian banks, pension funds and venture capital show that Canada is awash in financial capital, and more can be created by banks and government when there is demand for it.  

These new capital sources sit atop the current $612 billion in cash deposits in Canada’s non-financial corporations, almost $100 billion more........

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