Read the full transcript of Mark Carney’s speech at the Canada Investment Summit —
Thank you all, thank you very much. Prime Minister Harper, thank you for being here.
Dear friends, it is a pleasure to address you this morning.
I want to begin with harbours.
The origins of the nation of Canada began in the summer of 1604, when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia’s south shore.
He searched for a safe anchorage around blustery Cape Sable and into the Bay of Fundy, where he found what he described as “one of the finest harbours” he had ever seen.
He named it Port-Royal. Port-Royal offered shelter from the wild storms of the Atlantic, but it quickly became something far more: a base, perfectly situated for trade, exploration and the building of one of the most diverse and successful nations in history.
Today, four centuries on, I and my colleagues welcome you to a Canada which is both a safe harbour and a base to build, that’s perfectly situated to build in the new global economic order.
That world is becoming, as we know, more dangerous and divided.
Sovereignty and openness are in tension: economic integration has been weaponized, tariffs used as leverage, financial plumbing as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
At the same time, very positively, technological change is accelerating, but it’s changing the nature of war, the structure of economies, and the capacity of states to govern.
I’d suggest that Canada recognized this rupture earlier than most, and our response reflects two lessons that we have taken from it: First, and foremost, we must take care of ourselves, and second, we will always take care of each other.
Taking care of ourselves means building our strength here at home and diversifying our partnerships abroad.
We know we can’t control what others do, but we can be masters in our own home.
This is our primary focus. It’s what our government, the provinces, the territories, the private sector and above all, Canadians themselves have begun together – a great national effort to build Canada strong.
In this process of building sustainable prosperity for Canadians, we are creating enormous opportunities for investors.
Our goal is to catalyze one trillion dollars of investment in Canada over the next five years – in energy, in transportation, in tech and data, in defence, and beyond.
And to that end, in our first year as government, we cut taxes on incomes, capital gains, and business investment.
We begun building one Canadian economy by removing every single federal barrier to internal trade. We made it easier for Canadian workers to take their skills anywhere in this country.
And now, we are accelerating, working with provincial and territorial governments. New initiatives to tear down their barriers that have divided our economy for generations.
Our government has launched our most significant regulatory reforms to fast-track nation-building infrastructure. We have already referred 27 nation-building initiatives to our new Major Projects Office – that means new ports, mines, energy corridors from every region of the country that now represent $500-billion in new private investment opportunities.
We’re unleashing, in that process, our full potential as an energy superpower.
By advancing a pipeline that would carry at least one million barrels of low-emission Alberta oil per day to Asian markets, while creating a new industry of large-scale carbon capture and storage.
By doubling our LNG exports to 50 million tonnes annually by the end of this decade, and then doubling them again, right after.
By building nuclear power across the value chain, from operational SMRs to utility scale generators while expanding world-leading uranium production.
By doubling our electricity grid, building on our advantage of the lowest-cost power in the G7 and second-lowest emission power in the OECD. If you need clean, affordable power – and who doesn’t? – Canada is your answer.
Just last month, Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, the Federal government and the Innu Nation announced the largest clean energy investment in North American history – 14 gigawatts of hydro, wind and storage – the functional equivalent of 18 Hoover Dams.
Enough to light, heat and cool every home in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver combined.
That’s what an energy superpower looks like when it decides to act like one.
Canada is building its strength everywhere. We’re undertaking the biggest increase in defence spending since World War II. We’re now meeting our NATO obligations and have already provisioned in our budget the path to four per cent of GDP in total defence spending by 2030.
We will maximize the impact of that spending on our security and on our economy. Our Defence Industrial Strategy will catalyze half a trillion dollars in investment over the next decade – building on Canadian strengths in aerospace, shipbuilding, AI, cyber, quantum, robotics and autonomous systems. All dual-use applications that will drive innovation and productivity across the wider economy.
As I said earlier, Canada is now the best-connected economy in the world. In the past year, we have signed over 50 critical minerals agreements with more than fifteen countries, unlocking $20-billion in investment while reducing dependence on foreign chokeholds in critical supply chains.
In the same period, we have signed more than 20 trade and security deals across five continents, completing our most recent deal, with the UAE, in a record 47 days.
And I would like to pay tribute to the Emirates’ minister of international trade who has joined us for that accomplishment.
Over the next six months, we intend to double the access that we have, currently at 1.5 billion consumers around the world, we intend to double that over the next six months with new trade deals, from ASEAN, India and beyond.
We are also deepening ties with our most trusted partners.
We are the only non-European member of SAFE, the EU’s defence procurement initiative. And next month, we will begin discussions with the EU – the world’s second-largest economy – to build a unique security and economic alliance.
Our core objective of all these partnerships is to increase our sovereignty, our strategic autonomy.
Because, as I said earlier, we live in a world where integration has been weaponized.
Because a country that cannot feed, fuel, or defend itself is not truly sovereign.
And because today strategic autonomy extends to building partnerships in core capabilities across AI, payments, space, critical minerals, and clean energy.
And because when we invest in these capabilities at home and combine them with the strengths of trusted partners abroad, we multiply their value. We create greater scale for Canadian companies, greater resilience for our country, and greater opportunities for investors.
And to our American friends, let me say this. We will always be neighbours, and Canada will continue to be the U.S.’s most important partner in many key areas.
After all, even at times of disagreement over our long, shared history, we have always maintained deep ties.
These arrangements work best when we engage as true partners that respect each other’s traditions and sovereignty. And when those opportunities return, Canada will be an even better partner – stronger, more resilient, more independent – ready to advance our mutual economic and security interests.
Canada has this unparalleled market access because we have, as you’ve heard, what the world wants.
We also have that access because our reputation – as a reliable, predictable partner – has rarely been more valuable in a world where transactions are replacing relationships, and zero-sum is favoured over win-win.
We are blessed with many commodities and capabilities in Canada, but we have earned our most valuable asset, which is trust.
Now in our plan, we are just getting started, but the early results are encouraging.
Canada is projected to have the second-fastest growth in the G7 this year and next.
Our non-U.S. exports are up sharply and on track to double over the course of the next decade.
Foreign investment is running at nearly twice the rate of our nearest G7 peer.
And Canada now ranks as the most attractive country in the world for infrastructure investment. Our capital markets host 40 per cent of the world’s mining companies. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s most experienced infrastructure investors, our banks amongst the world’s most resilient.
And it’s the combination – resources, energy, technology, talent, and capital – brought together at scale, that helps make Canada unique.
Now a ship is safe in a harbour, but lying in harbour is not what ships are for.
Canada understands the world has changed. We know nostalgia is not a strategy.
And we know that, in a rupture, fortune favours the bold.
As I’ve said, we’ve never been more connected but we’ve also never been more ambitious.
And so we are now going to double down on our strategy.
At a time when investors are demanding to be fully compensated for risk, we will maximize Canada’s fiscal advantage, which is already the strongest in the G7.
And that starts with discipline. Our government is reducing the size of the civil service by 10 per cent, cutting spending on consultants by 20 per cent. Overall, we are reducing annual growth in operating spending from over eight per cent that had averaged in the previous decade to less than two per cent.
This is not austerity as a fetish. It’s part of our focus of distinguishing between operating and capital expenditures so we can both preserve our vital social programs and ensure that our precious fiscal capacity is focused on growing our economy.
I can announce today that we are on track to balance the operating budget next year, one year ahead of schedule, while maintaining the lowest overall deficit in the G7.
So we enter this period of investment with the strongest fiscal position, the lowest net debt-to-GDP ratio amongst major economies.
This gives us the capacity to invest alongside private capital and the macroeconomic resilience that investors value in uncertain times.
Going forward, we will increasingly optimize our balance sheet, by recycling assets to free up capital to invest in building Canada Strong.
Our goal is simple: to make Canada the most attractive place in the G7 to invest.
We’re strengthening our case in three ways.
First, we are making it cheaper to invest.
Effective today, Canada will allow immediate expensing for most new capital investment. Two-thirds of all assets will now qualify, from machinery and manufacturing equipment, to software, patents, R&D, fibre, rail, pipelines, and other infrastructure that’s needed to connect our economy.
The effect is straightforward: when you invest in Canada, you can deduct substantially more of that investment immediately. We call it the productivity mega deduction. In part because we used super deduction in the last budget.
But we also call it the mega deduction because the advantage it confers is huge. Canada’s policy will now cover more than four times the capital assets previously eligible for immediate expensing.
Today’s announcement will make Canada by far the most tax-competitive advanced economy for new investment. With the lowest marginal effective tax rate in the G7, less than half the U.S. rate, roughly one-third of the OECD average and one-quarter of the G7 average.
Put simply: your investment dollars will go a lot further in Canada than anywhere else in the advanced world.
The second thing we’re announcing today is that we will make it faster to build.
We have already begun by accelerating major nation-building projects through the Major Projects Office. And now we will apply the same urgency and efficiency more broadly through the new Build Canada Strong Act.
For projects and supply chains, our standard will be simple: One project. One review. One year.
Canada will remain a country of high standards. But high standards do not require slow decisions. Speed, certainty, predictability themselves are competitive advantages.
Investors should know that when Canada says it wants something built, Canada will get it built.
And third, we will connect Canada even better, to itself and to the world.
I’m announcing today that we will seek private investment through long-term concessions to operate Canada’s four largest airports.
Following best practice in other countries, the Government of Canada will retain ownership of the underlying land and assets, but we will unlock their true value, by bringing in new capital and expertise to their operations and their growth.
We will reinvest the tens of billions of dollars of capital that we raise into infrastructure that Canada needs for the next generation.
That will mean investing in regional airports, providing better and more affordable regional and remote air connections. It will mean a better passenger experience.
It will mean investing in new local transportation infrastructure to make commutes easier and faster for all Canadians.
And it will mean helping to finance new nation-building infrastructure, including a sovereign broadband backbone that connects Canadians from coast to coast to coast, with more direct, and secure links to Europe and Asia.
I note that Canadian pension funds already successfully invest and manage airports around the world. It’s time to bring that same expertise back home to directly benefit Canadians.
And through our new sovereign wealth fund, the Canada Strong Fund, Canadians themselves will retain a stake in the future value that’s created.
Taken together, these three broad measures represent a fundamental shift in how Canada approaches investment. Lowering the cost of capital. Shortening the distance between decision and construction. Unlocking public assets to build the infrastructure of the future, and ensuring that all Canadians directly benefit.
We have the resources, the talent, the fiscal capacity, and the access to the world’s largest pools of capital.
And now we are matching those fundamental advantages with the speed, ambition, and execution needed to build.
Now, Canadians know that it’s not just what we build. It’s how we build.
We will build sustainably: by protecting our lands and our waters, and using our clean-energy advantage to lower emissions and boost competitiveness.
We will build inclusively: in full partnership with Indigenous Peoples from the start, and I thank their leaders for joining us today. We will also ensure that Indigenous communities have direct stakes in the prosperity that we create together.
And we will build in solidarity with Canadian workers: creating the skills, careers, opportunities that will ensure that the benefits of this transformation are as broadly shared as possible.
In addition, through the Canada Strong Fund, we will invest alongside private capital in nation-building projects so that all Canadians have a direct stake in our future.
I said we took two lessons, from current events. One is what we know in our bones, which is that Canadians take care of each other. We believe in equal access to education, to health care, to social services. We are building universal childcare and affordable housing at scale.
And those same principles inform our approach to artificial intelligence: AI for All.
Canadians, some of them in this room, helped develop AI. Now we intend to capture its potential across the entire intelligence infrastructure stack: the clean energy that powers it, the computing cloud that runs it, the frontier AI, and quantum and robotics that will transform our economy.
Our AI for All strategy is distinguished by a singular focus on empowering people. We will build AI literacy across Canada, give every post-secondary student access to a trusted AI agent, and help our workers and businesses adopt AI, and our government to adopt AI to make them more productive and efficient.
So let me conclude, by coming back to harbours, or more precisely to ports.
Canada, you guessed it, is building our ports again. Deep-water ports on the Atlantic, Hudson’s Bay and the Pacific. New gateways to Europe and Asia. And, for the first time, new ports and trade corridors that open our Arctic to the world.
We won’t use those harbours to shelter from that stormy world.
Instead, we are expanding our ports to connect to the opportunities in it.
This is Canada today: a country that is building, trading and investing with an ambition and speed not seen in generations.
A country that is predictable, reliable and principled in a world that is anything but.
A country unleashing its enormous potential.
We are just getting started. We look forward to our journey together.
Thank you very much.
