Mark McQueen: Mark Carney threw a party and everyone came. What he does the morning after is key to our future - Toronto Star
Federal and provincial governments have squandered the last decade of opportunities. That needs to change
Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers remarks to Canadian business leaders at the Canada Investment Summit welcome reception on Sunday.
Mark McQueen is a Toronto-based entrepreneur, a former board chair of two federal agencies and an adviser in Brian Mulroney’s PMO and a columnist for the Star. Follow him on X: @markrmcqueen
Whatever comes of this week’s Canada Investment Summit in the long term, it’s an unqualified success in the moment: we threw a party and everyone came. Raising capital and growing your brand requires shots on goal, and this forum will invariably give some of Canada’s leading entrepreneurs a unique chance to tell their story to a rarefied audience.
There was a sense of foreboding when Invest in Canada CEO Laurel Broten (a former Ontario Liberal cabinet minster) told staff that she’d be “leaving” her role less than three weeks before a Summit that she was helping organize. We don’t know what went on behind the scenes, but it speaks to the timeless Bay Street reality that “people come and people go.”
Frank McKenna, Chair of Brookfield and Deputy Chair of TD Securities, has described the Summit as “the most interesting event that I’ve been part of in decades in Canada,” and as someone who has taken the 13-hour flight to meet with several of the world’s largest investors in Kuwait and the UAE, these moments are rare indeed. The fact that Ottawa pulled together a professional Confidential Information Memorandum of 167 interesting projects almost guarantees that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s offering will be more meaty than the Liberal government’s 2016 Infrastructure Summit.
Organized by global asset manager Blackrock, that earlier gabfest was billed as an opportunity for then-PM Justin Trudeau to pitch Canadian infrastructure projects to “two dozen representatives of large international pools of capital worth as much as $21 trillion.” Sound familiar?
Ahead of that summit, the Liberals launched their $35 billion Canada Infrastructure Bank, and credible promises were made about relaxing some restrictions on foreign investment to accompany a new “Invest in Canada Hub” that would to facilitate big investment cheques in our “toll bridges, energy grids and water systems.” Although the concept was anything but novel, as global infrastructure investors already had a portfolio of investments in toll roads, power lines — even Billy Bishop’s pedestrian tunnel — voters were assured that “attracting billions in private-sector capital for infrastructure projects is key to the Liberal government’s long-term strategy to boost Canada’s sluggish economic growth.”
Sounds positive — but once the summit ended, there was, tragically, no government follow-up. Let’s not make that mistake again.
Bountiful in resources, both intellectual and naturally formed, we’ve long known that “Canada has what the world wants.” That was true when the Hudson’s Bay Company started feeding European demand for beaver pelts in 1670, just as it was on display when the Province of Upper Canada set out to build the first Welland Canal in 1827.
When the schooner Anne & Jane undertook the canal’s first voyage, the destination was Buffalo, New York. That was thirteen short years after our forbearers had successfully spurned the American expansion effort known as the War of 1812: evidence that the opportunity represented by the U.S. market has always usurped political flashpoints.
I understand why Carney now sees the tradition of defaulting to southbound exports as a curse, but as Munk School Senior Fellow Sean Speer points out, investment summits that are mediated by politicians invariably lead to “state centric” central planning. While Carney’s business resume is more polished than Trudeau’s, Speer argues that the thinking behind this week’s summit represents “the continuity with Trudeaunomics” and that this “isn’t how market capitalism is supposed to work.”
Perhaps we need to remind ourselves that Canada’s best entrepreneurs have been tapping global markets since our nation was founded.
Senior Canadian bankers put together a $100 million syndicate to help launch construction of the CPR railroad in the 1880s. In 2004, when Canada’s Research In Motion surpassed one million worldwide BlackBerry users and needed growth capital, 250 different global institutional investors ponied up to buy almost $1.3 billion in stock.
Our nation’s current tech standard bearer, Shopify, didn’t rely on politicians to arrange speed-dating sessions for that firm to raise more than $7 billion from global investors between 2010 and 2021. Shopify’s team used that capital to create a business that’s currently valued at $230 billion, and I’m sure they’d concur with Speer when he says that the role of government is to create the “conditions under which” businesses can succeed. That’s it.
When the stock market was ripping, the late Ross McMaster — one of the best stock salesmen in a generation — would remind his Bay Street clients that “momentum is your friend.”
That federal and provincial governments of various political stripes have squandered the past decade isn’t in doubt. It’s also easily fixed, as long as Canada channels this week’s momentum to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset, dispense with the bureaucratic self-harm, and be relentless.
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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details
Mark McQueen is a Toronto-based entrepreneur, a former board chair of two federal agencies and an adviser in Brian Mulroney’s PMO and a columnist for the Star. Follow him on X: @markrmcqueen
