‘Canada Is Cool Again’: So Where’s our *Clean* Investment Summit?
PM Mark Carney is inviting 100 of the world’s top investors to funnel $1 trillion into Canada over the next five years. Their energy choices will determine whether this is great news or a disaster.
Alarm bells were tentatively ringing Friday morning after Prime Minister Mark Carney invited 100 of the world’s biggest investors to a high-powered summit in Toronto in September, aimed at bringing the country $1 trillion in new investment over the next five years.
“The summit is part of a broader effort to draw global investment back to Canada as the world grapples with deeper uncertainty and global volatility,” CBC reported. “Carney has been meeting with world leaders and private businesses during his trips abroad in an effort to attract more investment to Canada.”
Invites have already gone out to private investment giants like Blackrock, Inc. and big sovereign wealth funds like Singapore’s GIC, CBC wrote. “Part of the pitch is that, amid geopolitical turmoil, trade upheaval, and conflict, Canada offers a reliable place to invest in ports, pipelines, and infrastructure projects.”
“Canada has what the world wants,” Carney said in a release Friday, after CBC first broke the story. “We’re an energy superpower, with the most educated work force in the world and rock-solid fiscal strength. The first-ever Canada Investment Summit will capitalise on those advantages to help drive billions in new investments into Canada.”
Speaking from Washington, DC, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne dropped the other shoe. “Investors are looking for places to invest which offer that stability, predictability, and the rule of law,” he declared, at a media conference picked up by The Canadian Press. “That kind of message is resonating very loud and clear today.”
“Canada is in a really good place. Canada is cool again,” Michel Leduc, senior managing director and chief public affairs officer at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), told CBC. “It’s a little bit like a large public company holding their investor day.”
The PMO release said the federal government will co-host the gathering with CPPIB and the Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments).
CBC cited sovereign AI and data centres, new housing, and the military industries as areas where Canada is working to line up new investment. But of course, as always, as you would have expected…the “energy superpower” narrative, with the “fossil” energy modifier so obvious that it needn’t even be stated, figured prominently in the coverage.
“The oil and gas industry has been calling for new investment in pipelines and LNG terminals,” CBC wrote. “And despite a year’s worth of talk, there’s still no new proponent to build an oil pipeline to the West Coast.”
That comment followed weeks of saturation media releases, lobbying, and news coverage, all aimed at unwinding the pittance of industry regulation and carbon pricing that received a standing ovation [video] from the Calgary Chamber of Commerce when Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith first unveiled their controversial Memorandum of Understanding last November.
In case you haven’t been keeping score—the MOU was the moment when the former UN special envoy for climate action and finance and the former fossil industry lobbyist now enabling a separatist referendum in Alberta agreed to pursue 1.4 million barrels per day of new oil sands production, at least one new oil pipeline to Canada’s west coast, and a carbon capture megaproject that would sequester just a small proportion of the industry’s climate pollution—if it ever even works at all.
Pick Your Partners Carefully
We don’t yet know that the investors’ conference will follow the fossil-friendly direction of the MOU, or double down on Smith’s cozy relationship with what U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) is now calling out as the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia”. There are plenty of investment opportunities in nation-building projects that actually build the nation (or the nations, if we really mean it about seeing Indigenous communities move to the centre of the new climate economy). Or, as more than 250 municipal leaders in the #ElbowsUp for Climate Coalition put it last year, for “nation-building, not nation-burning” projects like:
• A national clean energy grid;
• Building two million energy-efficient, non-market homes;
• Energy retrofits for low-income homes and multi-unit buildings;
• A national high-speed rail and intercity bus system;
• A “national resilience, response, and recovery strategy.
Those priorities take on new meaning with investors and energy-importing countries rapidly shifting their focus to more secure and reliable, less economically volatile energy systems—which mostly means moving from fossil fuels to clean electricity—in response to the energy shock brought on by the American/Israeli war in Iran.
But the worry around the investor summit is still there, and not without reason. In the last week, we’ve heard rumours—only rumours, mind you—that pension funds are being arm-twisted to pour our retirement savings into the first phase of the LNG Canada gas export project, not long after the original private investors began bailing. And there’s worry that what amounts to a massive investor trade show for Canada will churn up the last dozen or two boneheaded investors on the planet (apart from two of our own pension funds, including one of the conference hosts) that still think there’s any money to be made in new oil and gas investments.
Oh, but have no fear—“Canada is cool again”—until you consider the source of the praise. What could possibly go wrong when you hear that from the pension plan that more than 22 million of us count on to properly manage our retirement savings, but in the last year has:
• Walked away from its climate targets;
• Added an estimated $6 billion in new fossil fuel investments in 2025 and faced scrutiny for holding 47% of its $780.7-billion portfolio in Donald Trump’s United States, compared to only 13% in Canada;
• Poured $4.1 billion into a U.S. gas infrastructure fund;
• Received a ‘D’ grade in the highly-regarded annual report card from Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health;
• Faced legal action from four Canadian youth for failing to protect their future pensions from climate risk?
“The fund has abandoned its net-zero commitment, appears to have walked away from its commitment to ‘green and transition’ investments, and now appears to have no disclosed climate strategy,” Shift said in its report card. “CPPIB’s leadership is failing to communicate climate urgency, with its President and CEO saying that ‘we like pipelines’ as the fund continues to invest in fossil fuels.”
PSP, Carney’s other chosen partner for the investment summit, placed just one spot above CPPIB with a C- score, far behind sector leaders like Quebec’s La Caisse and Ontario’s University Pension Plan. “With no interim targets beyond March 2026 (the end of PSP’s fiscal year), PSP has not yet indicated its future intentions for protecting its portfolio from climate-related risks,” Shift wrote earlier this year, and “PSP’s board remains entangled with the fossil fuel industry. In each of the years Shift has tracked fossil-fuel board entanglement, PSP has had a director who concurrently serves on the board of Imperial Oil.”
‘The World As It Is’
So it remains to be seen whether the “Canada is cool” kids that Carney is hanging out with will fulfill his “principled and pragmatic” mantra and “actively take on the world as it is, not wait for a world we wish to be.”
By their words and their actions, organizations like CPPIB and PSP are pining for a world where fossil fuels are ascendant, the climate emergency is a distraction best addressed with motivational media releases, and as one insider put it on a call last week, the “bros” who seem to make up the vast majority of Carney’s inner circle are firmly in control.
Except that they aren’t, not as long as they keep building a fossil fuel narrative in Canada that falls behind where the rest of the world is actually going. Carney’s summit could be a resounding, historic success if it begins with the recognition that:
• China is reaping the economic as well as the climate benefits of positioning itself as the world’s first electrostate.
• India is moving even farther and faster, with one recent analysis concluding that the world’s most populous country can affordably meet 90% of its electricity demand with solar and affordable battery storage.
• Pakistan installed enough behind-the-meter solar in just two years to cover about 20% of its electricity demand. A “perfect storm” of market forces produced “one of the most rapid and unanticipated transitions to clean energy, driven largely by homes and businesses installing rooftop solar panels,” the World Resources Institute reported last fall.
• In Vietnam, the Vingroup industrial conglomerate has sought permission to replace a planned 4.8-gigawatt liquefied natural gas plant, the country’s biggest, with renewable energy, Reuters reported exclusively March 31.
• Indonesia President Prabowo Subianto pledged a diesel replacement program that will increase his country’s solar+storage capacity from 11 to 100 GW in just two years. “This is a wake-up call,” he said.
These are the markets that the fossil industry, its enablers in Alberta, and its fellow travellers in Ottawa have in mind when they ridiculously claim that oil and gas demand will rise, rather than plummeting, for years or decades into the future. Those markets were already beginning to evaporate as 2026 dawned, and the devastation of the Persian Gulf war has dramatically accelerated the shift.
And yet we still see Carney and his energy and natural resources minister, Tim Hodgson, touting big plans to massively increase Canada’s fossil fuel exports into a market that almost certainly won’t need or want them. Even or especially with the Persian Gulf crisis creating a short-term shock, there is every sign that the energy transition will speed up over the years, not months that it would take to approve and build new oil and gas export infrastructure. And virtually no chance that future demand will carry investors through the decade or two that it would take to recover their stake in a multi-billion-dollar fossil megaproject.
The Summit Your Summit Could Be
But if they can just tilt their agenda 15 or 20°, there will be every reason for Carney and his team to convene an historic Canada Clean Investment Summit in Toronto this fall. Clean energy spending stood at $2.2 trillion last year, the International Energy Agency reported, compared to the $1 trillion still being funneled into fossil fuel projects. But we still need to pick up the pace to hit the COP28 target of tripling renewable energy deployment and doubling the rate of annual energy efficiency improvements by 2030.
Which means there’s still time for Canada to step up and catch up.
Here’s just a small sampling of the stories we’ve been following that point to the summit this summit could be—not as recommendations for specific companies, and certainly not as investment advice, but as examples of the kind of quick wins the summit should be looking for.
Unlocking Climate Investment Begins with Small ‘D’ Diplomacy
Up to $220B, 80,000 Jobs At Risk if Canada Can’t Deliver on Clean Power Grid
Choose Electrotech Over ‘Technologies of Delay’, Solar Entrepreneur Andrade Urges Canada
12 Solar, Two Wind Projects Grab Every Slot as Ontario Procurement Favours Affordable Power
Oneida Battery Project, Canada’s Biggest, Goes Online Ahead of Schedule, Under Budget
Eastern Ontario Township Breaks Ground on 411-MW/1,560-MWh Battery, Canada’s Largest
Net-Zero Prefab Builder Gets Ready to Scale Up as Carney Pledges Affordable Housing
Edmonton Apartment Retrofit Wins Guinness Record for Largest Solar Artwork
Crushed Rock Spread Across Ontario Fields in New Push to Capture Carbon
Undoing Renewables Obstacles Should Be Part of Energy MOU Talks: Pembina
New Auto Strategy Boosts Sovereignty, Aligns Canada with EV Transition
New Software Helps Condos, Apartment Buildings Install More EV Chargers
Montreal Start-Up Offers Long-Duration Storage for Remote Communities, Industries
But it’ll only happen if Carney, his advisors, and the two pension funds he’s brought onboard decide to go in the only direction that makes sense—for Canada’s economic future and sovereignty, and for the shifts in energy choices and financing that will begin to get climate change under control.
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.
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Global Energy Shock Highlights Canada’s Need for Long-Term Energy Planning
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$30M an hour: big oil reaping huge war windfall from consumers, analysis finds (The Guardian)
The new twin fossil shock: How the energy crises of the 2020s speed up the electric age (The Electrotech Revolution)
Imperial Oil pipeline spills 843,000 litres northwest of Cold Lake, AB (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
La Caisse adds $68B to climate investments from 2024 to 2025 (Sustainable Biz News)
Lytton, BC residents fear financial ruin from wildfire rebuilding costs (Globe and Mail)
U.S. pressure puts World Bank’s climate plan at risk (Climate Home News)
Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought (The Guardian)
China’s Arctic shipping ambitions are enabling a dangerous oil corridor (Corporate Knights)
Suniva announces 4.5-GW solar cell facility in South Carolina (Utility Dive)
UK households turn to solar panels as energy bills bite (Financial Times)
Russia Offers Sanctioned LNG to Energy-Hungry Asia at a Discount (Bloomberg)
'Give us a break,' northern mayor says at public meeting on SaskPower rate hikes (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
Thanks Mitchell. You have said it all.
If crying a river would hold back the floods and devastation, not to mention the complete US corporate takeover of Canada, I would do so gladly. As Yogi said “you can see a lot just by looking “.
Good analysis and good idea for a clean energy summit . Thanks