Movie actors, directors and producers descending on Canada’s largest city for the Toronto International Film Festival were not the only stars flooding its hotels on Tuesday.
The country’s prime minister, Mark Carney, gathered about 100 money managers from about 25 countries to explain why they should invest more of the trillions of dollars they control into Canada.
Growing interest in Canada as an investment destination no doubt helped lure them to the first Canada Investment Summit. But the growing stature of Mr. Carney, a former global banker, appears to have been another reason that money managers overseeing much of the world’s wealth accepted Canada’s invitation to a daylong sales pitch.
“The profile of the prime minister in this moment was part of the attraction,” said Deborah K. Orida, the president and chief executive of PSP Investments, which manages the pension funds of Canada’s public servants, as well as a Canadian government investment fund. Ms. Orida, a host of the gathering, once worked at Goldman Sachs, as did Mr. Carney.
“The conference is a great start; it’s not the end game,” Ms. Orida added. “Ultimately, our hope is that it’s a catalyst for future action and investments in the weeks, months and years to come.”
Mr. Carney’s meeting follows the collapse last month of trade talks with the Trump administration, the imposition by the United States of 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian exports, Canadian retaliatory tariffs on American goods and a U.S. ban on some Canadian products.
Since then, President Trump has returned to his calls to make Canada the 51st American state and has baffled and angered Canadians by declaring that Lake Ontario is now called “Lake America.”
Although Mr. Carney and his officials have avoided mentioning the United States or Mr. Trump by name in the lead-up to the meeting, they have repeatedly, if indirectly, contrasted their country’s financial and political situation with that of its neighbor.
“We can offer something that not a lot of countries can offer, which is stability and trust,” Mélanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister, said in an interview. “What markets are saying to us right now is that they trust Canada. So we wanted to be able to catalyze that enthusiasm and that optimism.”
A member survey by the London-based Global Infrastructure Association ranked Canada first in the “world’s most attractive market” for that type of investment. It was the first time that Canada had surpassed the United States and Germany in the poll.
While normally circumspect, Mr. Carney has set a high bar for the level of foreign investment he wants: $1 trillion over five years. He has repeatedly said that he wants that money to go into “nation building” projects that will make Canada less reliant and less integrated with the United States, regardless of how the trade war that Mr. Trump began against Canada, a formerly close U.S. ally, shakes out.
The 167 potential investments that Canada highlighted in a 66-page catalog for investors leans heavily toward infrastructure projects that Mr. Carney has long been promoting as an antidote to the economic consequences of diminished trade with the United States.
Some, like projects with liquid natural gas in Western Canada, seem likely to appeal to investors. But others, like turning the port at Churchill, in the far north of Manitoba on Hudson’s Bay in the subarctic, into a four-season operation, are not as obviously alluring, although they have significant political importance.
Absent from the offerings is the potential sell-off of public facilities like airports. Although there is strong investment demand for such takeovers, it’s not clear that the step would be accepted by the general Canadian public.
While the agenda fit with Mr. Carney’s political objectives, he took steps to show that luring foreign investors was not just his issue. Stephen Harper, the country’s last Conservative prime minister and a staunch partisan, is among the speakers.
On Monday night, a group of protesters marched from Toronto’s City Hall to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where Mr. Carney was hosting a dinner for the summit’s participants. Many demonstrators carried signs denouncing billionaires and corporate executives. The group included Indigenous people opposed to natural resource development on their lands. Some signs called for greater taxation on wealth, while others denounced Mr. Carney’s military build up called for an end to investments in fossil fuels, a sector being actively promoted at the summit.
The summit emulates similar events regularly held by other countries, including Germany and Japan. It’s a sharp contrast to how Canadians viewed foreign investment when Canada moved to distance itself from the United States during a wave of nationalism in 1973.
Rather than sell Canada to the world, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, then the prime minister, set up the Foreign Investment Review Agency. It had the task of blocking foreign takeovers unless they created jobs, made sure that the companies retained Canadian managers and met various economic policies, among other things.
Subsequent Conservative government greatly diluted the agency’s mission, although the industry ministry still reviews major takeovers, has blocked Chinese investments in natural resources and has forced some Chinese companies to sell Canadian mines on national security grounds.
“At the time,” Ms. Joly said, “Canada was not relying so much on exports and was not as integrated with the U.S. economy. Now, well, there’s a lot of unpredictability in the world and south of the border.”
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