“Our leaders tell us over and over that Canada is not for sale, but if you flip through the catalog [of potential investments being discussed at the Canada Investment Summit], obviously it is. Prime Minister [Mark] Carney has put a sign in the shop window, and half the buyers that he’s invited here to Toronto are American” says Kai Nagata with the B.C.-based advocacy organization Dogwood.
Dogwood and various groups including the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), the Council of Canadians, leaders of the the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en Nations, and World Beyond War have came together in Toronto to speak out against Carney’s high-profile summit. A counter-summit was held over the weekend, The Many vs. The Money, drawing several hundred attendees.
The investment summit is being billed as “conven[ing] the world’s largest investors, including top CEOs, entrepreneurs, and prominent global business leaders” in order to attract “new investment into Canada to advance Canada’s nation-building projects, create new career opportunities for Canadians, and grow our economy,” according to a federal government press release.
Attendees include the CEOs of the American asset management companies Blackrock and Blackstone, as well as Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, China Investment Corporation and other global giants.
Most news outlets and pundits have largely been supportive. The Globe and Mail, for example, published an op-ed from the CEO of the Canadian Pension Plan — a summit participant — calling it an opportunity to “seize the day.” On The Current on CBC radio last week, Rosemary Barton called the summit a good move by Carney in the trade war with Trump.
Not everyone is so convinced. “Every piece of our country that we sell off to American billionaires brings us closer to becoming the 51st state,” Nagata says “and this is already happening up north and out west, out of sight and out of mind.”
“Since Carney was elected, the only oil refinery on the west coast of Canada is now under American control. The only gas pipeline that we have to markets other than the U.S. is owned by Wall Street. And they want more. American private equity firms are on a buying spree in Canada and they are buying up our telecomm infrastructure, our farmland and billions of dollars worth of rental housing,” Nagata adds.
In a leaked catalogue prepared for the summit, Canadian investment opportunities being pitched include a trans-Atlantic fiber network connecting Norway and Canada, multiple AI data centres in Alberta, gold and other metal mines, a greenhouse expansion in Manitoba, weapons manufacturing and more.
“We know that the private equity funds, the Blackrocks, the Blackstones, and the black-hearted financial elites who are being gathered here today do not have our best interests at heart,” says Nik Barry-Shaw, a staff campaigner with the Council of Canadians, a national non-profit.
Investors, Barry-Shaw says, “have been lured here with the promise of the sale of our airports, of our water treatment centers, of our power grids, of our roads and bridges. And we know exactly what that means. … We know what that means because they’ve told us in their own documents that they send to investors. They say: ‘We like investing in this kind of public infrastructure because it’s a monopoly.’ People can’t go anywhere else. You can’t go to a different airport. If you have to fly, you have to go through Pearson. And that gives them the power to charge what they want.”
Barry-Shaw also notes that “at Davos, [Carney] said to his friends, ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.’ I’ve been looking around the table that Carney has set for this summit, and I don’t see any of us [there],” motioning to Indigenous, union and social movement leaders at the press conference.
A protest has been planned for Monday night, meeting at Nathan Philip Square at 6 p.m. and marching towards the Art Gallery of Ontario where Carney is hosting a dinner for his summit.
Rachel Small is helping organize the protest in her role as Canada Organizer for World Beyond War. “I know that I stand with many thousands of people across Toronto and many more across this country in rejecting Carney and his 200 invited CEOs’ vision of turning Canada into a country of AI data centers, of weapons factories, of leaky pipelines, of open pit mines” Small says.
“Toronto will not allow the global 0.001 per cent, these billionaires, to make decisions behind closed doors in our city to decide our futures. Our future is not for sale.”
