As Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit approaches, the proclamations have become breathless.
A “first-of-its-kind gathering,” gushed a government press release. “Seldom in history have so many high-powered financiers met at the same time and place,” exclaimed The Toronto Star. And almost all the media coverage has lauded how the prime minister has been working his ample global rolodex to summon investors who collectively oversee $120-trillion—that’s trillion with a ‘t’—in assets.
Tapping into global pools of money to boost Canada’s economy would seem like a stroke of genius that only a banker-PM could pull off—especially in the midst of a trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump that shows no sign of subsiding. But the chance to “help build Canada Strong” isn’t what has drawn the interest of gargantuan U.S.-based investment firms like BlackRock and Blackstone (who control no less than 10 per cent of all financial assets in the entire world).
The biggest lure for international investors will be the opportunity to get their hands on infrastructure that has already been built. Much of which, inconveniently for the financiers, are currently owned by all of us.
But over the last year, executives on Bay Street have accelerated a decade-long campaign to press the government to sell off key pieces of Canada’s public infrastructure—from airports to sea ports, highways to bridges, hydro-electric dams to power grids and water treatment systems.
They appear to have found a ready ear in Mark Carney. The prime minister is the former chairman of Brookfield, one of Canada’s biggest investment firms and most powerful advocates for precisely this approach. His inner circle is full of officials who pioneered turning public infrastructure into a frontier of private profit-making elsewhere in the world. Now, they sense their chance to do the same in Canada.
In the shadow of Trump’s trade war on the country, scrutiny has been suspended of Carney as he works his supposed financial wizardry. It hasn’t been noticed that the leading executives behind this privatization push are the very ones tasked with organizing the summit. In broad daylight, the titans of finance are directly wielding the apparatus of the Canadian state to try to massively enrich their companies.
It likely won’t end there. Carney appears ready to use proceeds from the sale of the country’s public infrastructure to subsidize private projects like oil pipelines, mines, and AI data centres—none of which will improve the cost-of-living crisis for most Canadians. It’s a financial scheme truly worthy of a former Goldman Sachs banker.
No wonder the corporate elite are cheering. There’s “buzz” and “chatter” on Bay Street, according to The Toronto Star. After a private meeting in Toronto with Carney where the summit was discussed, The Globe and Mail reported, “executives left smiling.”
One anonymous financier told CTV News that the investors attending the summit aren’t coming to “play.”
“They don’t want to hear speeches,” the source said. “What they’ve said is, ‘I’m coming—so tell me what I can buy.’”
A corporate wish list of public assets
“Look at your balance sheet and sell assets,” a Canadian pension fund executive declared at an event last fall on Bay Street. The remark was directed at federal and provincial finance ministers, and it announced the resumption of years-long lobbying by pension funds and other large investors calling on governments to “sell key infrastructure assets.”
Banks have also gotten in on the act. In a recent report, Scotiabank calculated that a staggering $470 billion dollars worth of public roads, rail, bridges, ports, airports, utilities, and pipelines in Canada could be sold off. Such infrastructure, in their words, “remains underutilized by investors.” And if governments wanted to be even more “ambitious,” the report advised, they could consider privatizing “community housing, healthcare, and educational institutions.”
For their part, Canada’s pension plans have spent the last several years campaigning for the government to create privatization opportunities at home. Pension funds may sound like the benign guardians of the savings of retired seniors, but Canada’s funds are headed by bankers from Bay Street and Wall Street and operate much like any other cutthroat investment firm. Indeed, they have been at the forefront of pioneering the privatization of public infrastructure in countries like England, Chile, and Australia. Canada’s Public Sector Pension Investment Board, one of the summit’s co-hosts, even has a specific subsidiary devoted to buying up airports and operating them privately.
These pension funds were central to the formation of a lobby group a decade ago, called the Global Infrastructure Investment Association, to push this privatization agenda. These days, the group’s members also include Brookfield, BlackRock, Blackstone, and several large global asset managers (not coincidentally, the same players attending Carney’s summit).
Until now, Canada has remained a mostly elusive target of their privatizations. “It has been a supply problem, not a demand problem,” one pension executive said at the Bay Street event in the fall. “The biggest recognition the government has to make is: it’s okay for a Canadian pension fund to own a bridge or a port or an airport.”
It sounds like Carney may give them their chance. The deputy head of the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, the other co-host of the summit, revealingly told the media that the summit will be “a little bit like a large public company holding their investor day” (as if Canada isn’t a country but a bundle of assets waiting to be sold). And according to reporting in The Globe and Mail, pension funds earlier this year provided the federal government with a wishlist of the assets they want privatized: airports, ports, bridges, pipelines, highways, and utilities.
The new receptiveness at the highest levels of government hasn’t gone unnoticed. After surveying its investors, the infrastructure privatization lobby group earlier this year elevated Canada to its top ranking for most attractive investment destination. “Canada is making all the right noises,” said its chief lobbyist.
Laying the groundwork to privatize airports
If there is to be a headline announcement during the summit or in the weeks afterward, it will likely be airport privatization, which some investors acknowledge is the “sweet spot.”
Carney’s government first signalled they would consider that in last fall’s budget, and followed up in the spring with a promise “to unlock the full value of airports in support of investments in Canada’s long-term growth, including through alternative models of ownership” (a classic Liberal euphemism).
They’ve already quietly laid the groundwork with legislation earlier this year legally forcing the authorities that currently run airports—non-profit, independent agencies that operate giant hubs like Toronto’s Pearson or Montreal-Trudeau—to hand over financial info that would help the government assess their market values (some previous estimates put it around $100 billion). According to an executive at an Australian investment firm aiming to buy stakes in Canadian infrastructure, the Liberal government has already received different proposals from its ministries on how to proceed with the privatization. To make it seem more palatable to the public, the Carney government might include Canadian pensions funds alongside a consortium of foreign buyers.
Liberals know their privatization agenda could face pushback. A poll earlier this summer found that a majority of Canadians are opposed to such plans for airports. Even that Scotiabank report scoping out the potential of privatization warns that Canadians “remain reluctant,” pointing out that past Liberal privatization schemes floated before the pandemic stalled “due to limited public appetite and political will.”
Canadians aren’t stupid: they know privatizing airports would turn flying, already one of life’s more unpleasant experiences, into something even more degrading. In countries where airport privatization has happened, new owners and investors have jacked up travel costs (look forward to paying even more to park and other extra surcharges), worsened working conditions, and deteriorated cleanliness and safety standards.
Privatization in general has a predictably terrible record in Canada. Once public infrastructure is turned over to private control, investors seek profit in one of several ways—higher bills and costs, user fees, hidden government subsidies, diminishment in the quality of service, or cuts in jobs and pay. Previous privatizations have left a trail of unsafely constructed schools, expensive toll highways, packed, dangerous prisons, water treatment systems flooded with sewage, hospitals built with faulty wiring in emergency rooms, and senior care homes over-run with inedible food and filth.
Attuned to the unpopularity, the government has recently started downplaying or even disguising their previously-professed commitment to infrastructure privatization. A list of prospective projects, leaked to The Toronto Star just before the summit, includes mostly fossil fuel, mining, and data centre projects. It did the trick: establishment journalists published stories claiming it “does not signal any intent to simply sell existing assets to foreign owners.” But they weren’t reading with a euphemism decoder: “the federal government is also exploring,” a nugget buried near the end reads, “new models of infrastructure ownership and investment to unlock additional sources of capital, including the intention to maximize the full value and economic potential of Canada’s airports by modernizing governance and increasing capacity.”
While the federal government has grown increasingly coy, among the big financial players of the infrastructure world it’s an open secret that privatization is central to Carney’s broader goals. Referring to the Investment Summit’s target of $1 trillion in new foreign investment to Canada, the Global Infrastructure Investment Association wrote: “Much of this capital would be generated by the prospect that Canada will privatize some of its major airports.”
The Privatizer-in-Chief
It’s no surprise why Carney is leading a charge on a privatization agenda—he has a long history of pursuing it himself.
While a younger banker at Goldman Sachs in 2002, he was dispatched to try to negotiate the privatization of Ontario’s public hydro utility, Hydro One. A few years later, as a senior official within the Ministry of Finance, he oversaw the sale of the last public stake in PetroCanada, the Crown corporation that had once helped break the dominance of U.S. oil corporations in Canada.
And just before running to become prime minister, he was the vice-chair of Brookfield Asset Management, an international leader in precisely the kind of infrastructure privatization on the table at the summit.
In a company briefing for investors from 2024, while Carney was still vice-chair, Brookfield described how investors could go about “capturing the benefits” of privatized infrastructure to generate “attractive returns.”
Toll roads, bridges, airports, power lines, solar and wind farms, communication towers, and data centers, in their description, are the “the backbone for basic, irreplaceable public services.” As a result, these infrastructure assets “benefit from relatively inelastic demand”—bankspeak for “you can’t avoid using them, even if they cost you.”
The benefits don’t stop there. They also “have high barriers to entry,” since a rival investor can’t easily come along and build a competing airport or power grid next to yours. They are natural monopolies and thus “often face little or no competition.” And when inflation hits, as it sometimes does, a solution is readily available: “owners can pass inflation on to consumers through price increases.”
The end result? “Long term cash flows” and “high operating margins,” or profits flowing for decades, which is what Carney may now want to offer to the same investors he once served as a banker.
Neoliberal déjà vu
Despite the over-the-top rhetoric about the unprecedented nature of the summit, we’ve actually been here before. Back in 2016, Justin Trudeau hosted a splashy summit to pitch Canada as an investment destination. It was at an equally posh Toronto hotel, the Shangri-La. All the same big institutional investors were there: BlackRock, the investment arms of Singapore and Hong Kong, the sovereign wealth funds of Norway, Saudi Arabia, and China. And at the time, even an unimpressible journalist like the Star’s Paul Wells was losing his cool. “Writing about this stuff, for the first time in a quarter-century in journalism, I’m getting used to typing the word ‘trillion,’” he enthused.
In those years, some of Justin Trudeau’s chief economic advisors—Larry Fink of BlackRock; Mark Wiseman, who headed up Canada Pension Plan Investment Board; Michael Sabia, who led Quebec’s equivalent; and Dominic Barton, a managing partner at global consultancy firm McKinsey—had been tasked to raise the living standards of Canadians. Instead they set out to raise the profits of major investment firms and pension funds, including the ones they worked at themselves.
Of the four, Fink, Wiseman, and Barton had earlier in 2013 formed a think tank with the innocuous name of Focusing Capital on the Long Term. A report they produced in 2015 made clear that in a slow-growth world, cannibalizing public infrastructure was the best thing capital could do to generate a buck: infrastructure investments “should present a rich opportunity…with predictable income streams and time spans measured in decades.”
So when Trudeau’s economic council released their recommendations to the government, it was no surprise that they endorsed the idea of a bank that would allow investors to buy a stake in or entirely own privatized toll highways, bridges, high-speed rail, utilities, airports and ports, and resource infrastructure.
At that 2016 summit, which Larry Fink MC’ed, Trudeau’s government had tried to line up private investors for their privatization bank. It was later revealed that BlackRock executives spent months in advance of the summit secretly working with senior civil servants and ministers’ aides to prepare the presentations ministers would deliver to wealthy investors—many of whom were BlackRock clients.
Unfortunately for them, the Trudeau government got cold feet. They backed off privatizing airports and sea ports, on the heels of bad internal focus groups and public polling, as well as pushback from labour unions and airport authorities. They ultimately never offered projects that would secure extremely large profits for investors on Wall Street and elsewhere (though Sabia did get a billion dollar support for the Réseau express métropolitain (REM), a public-private light rail project in Montreal).
But now it appears the high-powered financiers might get a second chance. Conveniently, all of these men—and with Carney, it’s seemingly always men—are back in the picture with the current Liberal government. Fink will be a headliner at next week’s summit (though we’ll have to wait for access-to-information documents to discover if BlackRock has written the presentations again). Wiseman is now Canada’s ambassador to the U.S., though is still considered to be part of Carney’s innermost circle and has been involved in pitching global investors. Sabia is Canada’s top civil servant, to which he brings his extensive experience in privatizing Crown corporations with Brian Mulroney’s government. And Barton was recently appointed chair of Invest in Canada, the Trudeau-era agency tasked to attract global investment, which is organizing the Investment Summit. The déjà vu is unmistakable.
We had been told that such chances wouldn’t come again. Barton had exclaimed in 2016 that it was “a once-in-a-generation opportunity.” Another member of Trudeau’s economic advisory circle, a former Goldman Sachs VP, had promised that “if the prime minister really takes it in his hands and runs with it, he will change the future of this country.” Even journalists like Paul Wells seemed to buy the rhetoric that they must seize the moment, dramatically quoting one of Trudeau’s advisers telling him, “We just don’t know how long this will last.”
Well, persist it has, because Bay Street and Wall Street will always circle when there’s a giant fortune to be made. The only thing that’s changed is Carney seems to want to make sure the message is clear: this time, he means to deliver on a corporate carve-up of Canada.
One node in Carney’s corporate agenda
The sell-off of public infrastructure may only be the first step in a broader corporate play that unfolds during the summit and in the months after.
While the Carney government has been cagey about its exact plans, the proceeds of any sales appear likely to be funneled into its Canada Strong Fund, which will then provide massive public subsidies to widely-opposed and unnecessary projects.
Earlier this year, the Liberals laid out how the fund, which would backstop projects with $25 billion in taxpayer dollars, would raise money by “generating the full value from federal assets,” and linked this with “alternative models of ownership” for airports. In a speech announcing the fund, Carney stated that it will grow “through asset recycling”—another bit of bankspeak borrowed from Australia, where governments in the 2010s sold off airports and other public infrastructure to raise money for investments elsewhere.
The fund was pitched as a chance for Canadians to “own a small piece of nation-building projects and share in their returns.” But it has quickly become clear that Carney intends to use public money to subsidize oil and gas pipelines, LNG terminals, and critical mineral projects, which are sure to face local backlash, legal challenges, and political opposition from Indigenous communities, environmental groups, the NDP, and others. These massive extraction projects are considered risky enough by investors that they wouldn’t want to take them on without substantial government guarantees (read: handouts and subsidies). That’s where all the money from fresh privatizations may come in handy.
In sum, Carney seems to be planning to sell off public infrastructure we need to help fund private infrastructure we don’t—with our money covering the risk, while investors make off with the profits.
The financial backing for such projects has been tag-teamed by Carney’s deregulation, which seeks to fast-track projects by minimizing or overriding obligations to engage in environmental assessments and consult Indigenous communities. None other than the trusty infrastructure privatization lobby—the Global Infrastructure Investment Association—has lauded Canada for entering a “distinct new phase” for investment.
Of course, there is nothing new about Canada’s dependence on climate-torching, treaty-violating extractive industries, which Carney’s list of “nation building projects” will double down on. But if there is one major change in the last decade, it is the AI investment mania that has gripped investors.
The scale of infrastructure investments required to build out AI data centres and feed their ravenous appetites for water and energy has outstripped the capacity of pension funds. So Canada’s pension funds are increasingly teaming up with larger investors to “land megadeals,” according to The Financial Post, drawing in major asset managers like BlackRock and Blackstone, as well as sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—all of whom will also be present in Toronto for the summit. Record sums are now being raised.
In the business press, this finally signals the shift of the infrastructure market from a mere “backwater” into one of the “the most important strategies of the largest private capital groups.”
But supercharging investments in these destructive, wealth-concentrating sectors will do nothing to improve Canadians’ well-being. Indeed, even if economic growth does happen, its benefits won’t be shared widely—especially as Carney has sought since his election to make the tax system more regressive.
In their more honest moments, even the top financiers attending Carney’s summit understand where this agenda is taking our societies. “The massive wealth created over the past several generations flowed mostly to people who already owned financial assets,” wrote BlackRock CEO Larry Fink in his latest annual letter to investors. “Now AI threatens to repeat that pattern at an even larger scale.”
The coalescing resistance
For more than 40 years in Canada, privatization has been central to an elite agenda implemented by successive Liberal and Tory governments. The result of elevating corporate interest into the driver’s seat of government policy has been predictable: the transfer of wealth from the poorer to the wealthy, from the public trust to the private clutch.
In some ways, Liberals have been able to advance this neoliberal project even more effectively than their Conservative counterparts. Liberal Premier of Ontario Dalton McGuinty once boasted that Canadians were simply less suspicious of Liberals: “We did more work in concert with the private sector than the Conservatives could ever have dreamed, largely because Liberals were trusted by the public to implement this policy in a balanced way,” he wrote in his memoir.
The organized resistance that’s starting to coalesce shows that Canadians are beginning to get rightly suspicious of a corporate banker in a prime minister’s clothing. In the days before the Investment Summit, a broad coalition of organizations is hosting a counter-summit called The Many vs. the Money. (Both the authors are involved.) On the grounds of OCAD university in Toronto, dozens of groups from different movements—including labour, Indigenous and migrants’ rights, climate, anti-war, and Palestine solidarity—will be holding a full day of teach-ins exposing the corporate forces behind the Carney agenda. The following day, a cheekily branded “welcoming committee” will march to the doors of the gala where investment summit guests will be hosted by Mark Carney.
Carney’s honeymoon will only last for so long, and popular mobilization can help expedite its demise. It can also raise the political cost of Carney pursuing his full corporate agenda. Past privatization efforts—under Trudeau and before—have been defeated, and they can be defeated again.
Mobilization can also help return to mainstream discourse the kind of infrastructure agenda we desperately need. We do have to build big in Canada—solar and wind power, an east-west energy grid, non-market housing, high-speed rail and electric buses, and heat pumps in homes. But this can be funded through massive public investment, with the government borrowing money cheaply to do it.
Carney has gotten major political mileage out of a posture of nationalist defiance toward Trump. But unless we can turn the tide, a government that swept to power promising that “Canada was not for sale” will be putting Canada Inc. on the auction block.
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