Book Review: Prospectus for Carney’s Investment Summit Contains Legit Projects, Major Landmines, Epic Head-Scratchers

When you bring together 250 close friends who are also among the world’s biggest investors, how do you keep them entertained? This dealbook is part substance, part spin, part carbon bomb.

Sep 14, 2026

With Prime Minister Mark Carney set to convene 250 of the world’s biggest financial institutions and investment houses this week, the 67-page dealbook for his Canada Investment Summit has been the talk of the virtual town since it began circulating late last week.

The 167 projects in the prospectus are a tantalizing but sometimes strange mix that includes a good number of “shovel-ready” projects that are ready to roll—some of them for better through a clean climate economy lens, some of them for worse. Farther down the priority list are pitches that range from preliminary and marginal to a handful that verge on the downright wacky.

While we’re playing best of times-worst of times, did you ever think you would open The Energy Mix Weekender to find…a book review? We sure didn’t see that coming.

Big-Ticket Carbon Bombs

It isn’t the first time in recent months that we’ve seen a split-screen between the practical, affordable nation-building options that decision-makers readily endorse in principle and the old-economy carbon bombs they still favour in practice, for short-term investment. Now, to some degree, here we are again.

Behold! The dealbook includes two Indigenous-owned wind farms, led by the Upper Nicola Band and the West Moberly First Nations in British Columbia, as well as the massive Wind West project in Atlantic Canada. And that’s not all. The Power and Utilities section includes energy storage, refurbishment of existing hydropower plants, and regional transmission lines. The Clean Energy listing leans heavily toward sustainable aviation fuels and biofuels, with nods to clean energy manufacturing and even tidal power.

Beware! The prospectus identifies the Ksi Lisims liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal as “fully permitted and shovel-ready”, includes the proposed West Coast Oil Pipeline as a project at an “early stage of development”, and lists the Prairie Connector project as a proposed pipeline extension from Hardisty, Alberta to the U.S. border.

Be still my heart! There’s still someone in the known universe who sees any future prospect in bolting old-line carbon capture and storage technology onto oil and gas facilities. Or pushing biomass with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) techniques that have long since been dismissed by international experts. Or building blue and tourquoise hydrogen projects that depend on carbon capture technology working as promised. Even after scientists found and its most avid proponents admitted that CCS won’t be ready for prime time until at least 2035.

And after the Canadian Climate Institute concluded that new oil sands development triggered by the Pathways carbon capture hub will exceed any emissions that Pathways actually manages to capture and store.

Then there are the projects so preliminary that the capsule pitches contain no information on their financing needs, or even their current stage of development. One of them, a “pre-application” listing for the recently-announced, already-controversial Kino Aski LNG project in Quebec, provides a Gmail address for follow-ups.

You would almost conclude it was sufficient for some fossil fuel projects to put together an initial concept, attach it to a minimum $200-million budget, maybe issue a media release, and get it into the Investment Summit mill. How else to explain that some of these projects made the cut when the dealbook left out so many smart, investor-ready clean economy projects that are ready for prime time but thirsting for investment? Multi-billion-dollar endeavours that will strengthen communities, modernize our energy system, reduce climate pollution, and position Canada well with international trading partners, while supporting the PM’s economic and sovereignty objectives?

A Seat at the Table or Table Scraps?

The Minerals and Metals section is by far the largest in the prospectus, with 63 projects listed. A good number of them involve critical minerals and supply chains that are key pieces of the puzzle for the energy transition, though we’ve been hearing some rumblings that the balance in the projects is off: at the moment, some industry experts say, solidifying processing capacity and supply chains is a more immediate priority than getting new mines up and running.

Both the minerals listings and the power and utilities section combine projects that will be a part of the clean economy if they’re done right with pitches that no community should want in its back yard—uranium mining in the minerals section, the Bruce C and Wesleyville nuclear stations under power and utilities. Before we even dive into the health and environmental impacts of nuclear technology, or its role in pulling us farther from a smarter, more distributed grid, the outsized costs and long lag times for nuclear should be enough to disqualify it.

The same split between good news and bad permeates the Clean Energy section. It contains 29 projects, compared to just 11 for a Conventional Energy chapter dominated by oil and gas. But the government expands its definition of “clean” to include hydrogen processes that could emit more climate pollution than burning fossil fuels (granted, that takes a certain kind of talent), and carbon capture attached to a fossil industry that exports about 80% of its emissions, far beyond the reach of even a successful CCS project.

The list of carbon capture projects in the dealbook could call for some subtlety from climate hawks who tend to paint all carbon dioxide removal with a single brush. Any technology, potentially clean or not, has to answer questions about impacts, benefits, community consent, and more. But there are important differences between CCS schemes meant primarily to provide political cover for oil sands operators and diligent attempts that could make a difference in other high-emitting sectors. Some of that dichotomy is reflected in the dealbook.

But after all that, the difference between a seat at the table and table scraps is most obvious in what the dealbook doesn’t say.

• It leaves out essential elements of the clean climate economy—commercial building retrofits, a residential retrofit mission, heat pump deployment, smart grid deployment, electric vehicle and commercial fleet charging infrastructure, rooftop and community solar, and so much more. They’re all at least as advanced as a good number of the old-economy projects that made it into the dealbook, and much better aligned with the more serious treatment of sustainable finance and climate impacts in many of the countries where Canada is looking for wider trading relationships.

• It’s notable that the standard headings in the prospectus address the projects’ current stage of development, capital expenditure requirements, and financing objectives. It’s silent on climate and other environmental impacts, community impacts and benefits, job creation, or any of the other essential factors for the communities that will host the projects…I guess because there’s only so much you can say in 75 words?

That latter point isn’t necessarily a fatal flaw when you consider that this prospectus is a pitch document for investors, not an accountability report for those of us on the outside looking in.

But the gaps in the story make it crystal clear that the government’s work doesn’t end here. If this is what Carney needed to bring some of the world’s biggest investors to the table—and if he sees that influx of capital as a way to wrest control of our own economy away from a southern neighbour we can no longer trust—that’s fair enough for this week. But by the time this is done, he’ll still need to earn community trust and buy-in for the projects he’s pitching.

Back to the Beginning

In the end, the most telling part of the dealbook might be the disclaimer on the opening page. It stresses that:

The Canada Investment Summit Prospectus highlights selected investment opportunities in Canada and is not intended to represent a comprehensive list of all ongoing projects nationwide. Project information contained herein was submitted directly by the respective project proponents and has been included substantially in the form provided….
These materials have been prepared solely for information and discussion purposes. The projects included continue to evolve and are subject to change. Inclusion in the Deal Book should not be construed as an endorsement of any project, company, or investment opportunity. The information provided does not contain all details that may be required to evaluate any project, investment, or matter referenced herein.

It also warns that the pitchbook:

…should not be copied, shared, reproduced, distributed, quoted, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or in part, without prior written consent.

So we’d better clarify that, while we were pleased to be one of the first news organizations the publish the full PDF, the ship had sailed on its confidentiality by the time it fell into our hands. (And to the person who did the throwing…you know who you are, and thank you.)

But beyond the confidentiality clause, the main body of the disclaimer tells us some important things about the summit and the pitchbook.

• It doesn’t constitute an endorsement for any of the projects on offer, not for Nicola or West Moberly Wind, not for Ksi Lisims or the West Coast Oil Pipeline.

• The Carney government and its partners hosting the summit haven’t vetted the projects or deeply verified the proponents’ claims. That might explain why the dealbook uncritically includes a massive pipeline megaproject that was originally conditional on private investment, but is so far funded 90% by Canadian taxpayers, after the government presumably scoured the Earth for anyone willing to buy in. Or LNG terminals that are just months or a couple of years away from a crippling and likely permanent glut in global supplies that will undercut their future markets.

• That kind of detail isn’t in the dealbook, and investors shouldn’t expect it to be. The document is laid out with four pitches to a page, with multi-billion-dollar ventures presented in no more than 75 to 100 words.

• The surrounding context for the dealbook and the projects themselves are all subject to change.

It adds up to a high-stakes game of caveat emptor for each of the investors in the room, just as it is for the rest of us. It also means, as we’ve been seeing in news coverage over the last week, that this week’s conversations are largely preliminary—while there will be some firm announcements, most of the deals will take months or years to take shape. Or not.

That’s one more way in which the Canada Investment Summit, notable milestone that it is, is not the end of the conversation—for Carney, his investors, or Canadians as a whole. It’s barely the end of the beginning.

Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix and The Energy Mix Weekender.