Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney Talks US Trade, AI Guardrails

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Brian Platt (0:07)

Prime Minister Carney, thank you for taking the time to sit down with us.

Mark Carney (0:10)

Thanks for doing this, Brian.

Brian Platt (0:11)

So we're in Toronto for the first ever Canada Investment Summit. You've got many of the biggest names in the world in terms of money management here, sovereign wealth funds, investment firms, asset managers. And you've got a deal book for them to look through, Canadian infrastructure, mines, oil, gas, clean technology, data centers.

I'm told you were quite involved in the planning of this. Give us your pitch. Why was this a big priority for you?

Mark Carney (0:35)

Well, look, I think Canada is one of the most connected economies in the world. We have trade deals covering one and a half billion consumers. Our pension funds, our financial institutions, are very involved in investing in other countries. We want reciprocity.

We want to welcome foreign capital here in a bigger scale, bringing energy ideas. Capital, yes, we do have capital here, but those are different perspectives. So, and we also have been making some big changes over the course of the last year and a half. Now is the time to look at Canada fresh. And one of the things that we've discovered over the course of the last year is that foreign capital is under allocated to Canada. It's not, I mean, we're on Bloomberg, so I can say that it's not market weight to Canada.

So even a shift to market weight to Canada will create a tremendous inflow of capital and it's going to help us realize what we think this economy needs, which is to catalyze about a trillion dollars of investment over the next five years.

Brian Platt (1:34)

So why is Canada underweight? What's your diagnosis?

Mark Carney (1:37)

Well, I think there's been a few factors.

One of them has been some major pools of capital have allocated to America, if I can put it that way. So US and Canada lumped together and they end up overweight the US., underweight Canada. That's just the way it's worked. And that works in a seamless global environment.

The world's changing, so it makes less sense now. So they're looking afresh. So that's the first thing. Secondly, we've been slow on moving on a series of areas with respect to regulatory approvals and other factors would be one classic example. That's why the first legislation that my government put in place, last spring, was the Build Canada Act.

One Canadian economy, speeding approvals for major projects, key elements of that. We're going to double down on that strategy. You'll see in the coming weeks with additional measures that spread that across the economy. So that's another reason to come in. Third issue is around the overall competitiveness, tax competitiveness. We're pretty good. We accelerated or we deepened that tax competitiveness in the budget of 2025 We will look at other ways of doing that again in the coming weeks. So it's a good story. It's becoming a great story at exactly the time when global capital is looking for opportunity, but also reliability. That's becoming a fundamental driver of competitiveness. And of course, that's something that Canadians are justifiably proud of.

Brian Platt (3:09)

You mentioned some of these as essentially structural problems around regulation or taxes. Do you think, is any of this an attitude problem, or is our business sector not ambitious enough when it comes to attracting these kinds of, this kind of global capital?

Mark Carney (3:22)

Well, I think, look, my experience over time is when you have big change, whether it's a financial crisis, whether it's the rupture at present, whether it's a big technological change, fortune favors the bold. These are the times when you should be ambitious, you should take big steps, and you will get outsize rewards. What we're seeing now, I'm not going to comment necessarily on the past, but what we're seeing now is Canadian business, Canadian financial institutions really beginning to step up for Canada. A series of announcements, we're recording to this at a certain point, so I don't want to front run, some things are coming. But we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars of additional Canadian capital, incremental capital being allocated to Canada because they want to see that ambition level of our private sector really starting to ramp up.

Brian Platt (4:16)

But part of your message here is you want to see corporate Canada get more bold, get more ambitious. Is that part of the message that you have?

Mark Carney (4:23)

Well, I think one of the messages that is there across the country, and it's not corporate Canada, it's Canadians. You go to anywhere in the country, as in PEI, Grossmourne, rural Alberta, British Columbia, across the country Canadians are uniting.