Mark Carney says global money managers do not hold Canada even at the weight a benchmark would imply, and that closing that one gap would move hundreds of billions of dollars.
Most governments pitching foreign investors argue their country is cheap or fast-growing. Carney's pitch is a portfolio construction point: large pools of capital treat Canada and the United States as one North American allocation and end up overweight the larger half.
"So even a shift to market weight to Canada will create a tremendous inflow of capital."
Carney ran the Bank of Canada through the financial crisis and the Bank of England through Brexit before he became prime minister, so the language of benchmarks and allocations is his own rather than a speechwriter's.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 15 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 9 takeaways that matter.
👤 Guest: Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, previously Governor of the Bank of Canada and Governor of the Bank of England
🎙️ Host: Brian Platt, Bloomberg News' Ottawa Bureau Chief
📰 Published: 14 September 2026 on YouTube (Bloomberg Podcasts)
🔴 YouTube | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 15 min | ✅ Time saved: 5 min
Key Takeaways
Foreign capital is not underweight Canada by choice, it is underweight by benchmark habit
Large pools lump the US and Canada together and end up overweight the larger market
A sitting G7 leader is asking for an international body to police AI safety
Carney wants a technology stability board built the way the financial one was
The near-term AI proposal is a self-regulator, not a law, because laws are slow
A G7 discussion in June floated a US-led body along the lines of FINRA
Canada is not trying to reach the AI frontier and says so plainly
The trade red lines are sovereignty, culture, and the right to sign other deals
Everything else is negotiable, Carney said, and neither side has to move first
Canada joined a 150 billion euro European defense pact as its only non-European member
1. The Investment Summit Pitch
Brian Platt opened in Toronto at the first Canada Investment Summit, describing a room of sovereign wealth funds, asset managers and investment firms handed a deal book of Canadian infrastructure, mines, oil, gas, clean technology and data centers, and asked Carney for his pitch.
Carney's opening claim was about reach rather than returns: "We have trade deals covering one and a half billion consumers," he said, and Canadian pension funds and financial institutions already invest heavily abroad.
What he wants back is symmetry. "We want reciprocity. We want to welcome foreign capital here in a bigger scale, bringing energy ideas." Canada is not short of domestic money — "Capital, yes, we do have capital here, but there's different perspectives" — but the case for a fresh look, he said, rests on eighteen months of policy change.
The target he attached to it: "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."
2. Why Canada Is Underweight
Asked for his diagnosis of the shortfall, Carney gave three causes, and the first is the one an allocator would recognize.
"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," he said — then went further, saying it is not even at benchmark weight.
The mechanism is aggregation: "So US and Canada lump together and they end up overweight the US, underweight Canada." That worked, he said, "in a seamless global environment," and the world is changing.
Second was speed. "That's why the first legislation that my government put in place last spring was the Build Canada Act," he said, describing it as one Canadian economy plus faster approvals for major projects, with more measures "in the coming weeks."
Third was tax. "We accelerated or we deepened that tax competitiveness in the budget of 2025," he said, with further steps promised, and argued reliability is now itself a competitive asset — "that's becoming a fundamental driver of competitiveness."
3. Corporate Canada Steps Up
Platt pressed on whether the problem is structural at all, or whether Canadian business is simply not ambitious enough to attract global money.
Carney would not criticize the past but made a general case for acting in disruption: "These are the times when you should be ambitious, you should take big steps, and you will get outsized rewards." His phrase for it was that "fortune favours the bold."
He said the summit was producing commitments he could not yet detail, describing "hundreds of billions of dollars of additional Canadian capital, incremental capital, being allocated to Canada" because domestic institutions can see the private sector's ambition rising.
Asked whether the message is aimed at corporate Canada, he redirected it at the country, naming Prince Edward Island, Gros Morne, rural Alberta and British Columbia. "Canadians are uniting. They have a positive attitude." "And I think that's infectious. And we're starting to get that positive dynamic, that flywheel, if you will."
On trade reach: "We intend to double that number within the next six months," taking access from the one and a half billion consumers he had named at the top.
4. Not Picking Winners
Platt put the main domestic criticism to him directly — that the major projects office means the state is choosing which projects get special treatment, and risks crowding out private capital.
"I don't think there's a danger we're crowding out the private sector," Carney said, pointing again to the volume of Canadian institutional money already available.
His defense was the category of project rather than the choice of winner. "In other words, they're projects that unlock other opportunities, doubling the electricity grid." "Mastering energy, you master your destiny."
The worked example was hydro: "The federal government getting involved in Churchill Falls, 14 gigawatts of clean power, low-cost clean power, would not have happened without the federal government getting involved," which he said unlocks opportunity for Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Canada.
He also named a western oil pipeline linked to the Pacific Gateway, a new Alberta carbon capture industry that "will be driven by the private sector," and an expansion of the country's largest port.
The third point has legislation behind it: "One project, one review, one year across all federal projects," a priority for the fall. "And that's not picking winners. That's changing the playing field."
5. A Tech Stability Board
Asked about AI leaders publicly calling to slow the pace of frontier development on safety grounds, Carney said he was not surprised, and described conversations he has already had with the people running the labs.
"I've had a number of conversations, whether it's with Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, specifically about these issues and how to balance innovation with a form of governance that takes safety into account," he said.
His argument is that competition makes self-restraint impossible: "It is very, very difficult for individual companies, incredible as some of these companies are, individual companies, in an industry, a competitive industry, to do that themselves."
He read the industry's own appeals as evidence. "I think it's interesting that the industry is calling out, the leaders in the industry, including Elon Musk, calling out for that, some level of coordination."
"We've had initial discussions at the G7 of how that might be done," he said, crediting Hassabis with putting forward ideas.
The proposal itself: "Ultimately, a technology stability board, in our view, along the lines of the financial stability board, would make sense." He expects the result to be greater value creation and better delivery of it to people.
6. A Self-Regulator First
Platt narrowed it to the United States — whether Carney wants Congress to legislate guardrails on what are mostly American companies.
Carney argued against waiting for the ideal answer. "Well, I think we have to be careful in this situation that the best is not the enemy of the good."
"In other words, we need practical steps in the immediate term," he said, describing a June G7 discussion of a US-led body modeled on the broker-dealer self-regulator FINRA — "a FINRA-type organization for tech, which would be a stepping stone to something more broad."
His reason for preferring that route is timing: "Legislation takes time, so a level of coordination being there, that is what the industry is looking for."
7. Canada's Role in AI
Platt pushed back that the conversation had been framed as American, when Chinese and Canadian expertise both exist, and noted that much of the foundational AI research came out of Toronto.
Carney named Cohere as the Canadian example and said the role Canada can play is a combined one, with France, Germany and the UK as the obvious partners.
He then set the ceiling himself: "It doesn't mean we're at the frontier, but we're providing a layer that works for our citizens, that is sovereign and safe."
8. A Deal With the US
Asked whether President Trump's weekend comment about reaching a deal with Canada "fairly soon" meant anything specific, Carney gave the line he says has not changed.
He said a mutually advantageous agreement between the two countries is possible, one respecting both countries' sovereignty and Canada's cultural institutions. "We're ready to sit down and negotiate that and move it forward." "So I welcome the President's comments."
On who moves first: "No, there's not a pride thing from our perspective." Canada knows its bottom lines, he said, and its red lines are sovereignty, culture, and not being restricted in its ability to sign other trade deals.
That third red line is the commercial one: "I referenced, we are on a path to double our trade access to 3 billion consumers around the world." "We are not going to slow down on that."
He said his American counterparts perhaps understand those red lines more clearly now, given what has happened. "There's no pride in this. We're going to do what's right for the Canadian people."
9. After the Trade Fight
Platt raised the recent ugliness — Trump cabinet members mocking and trolling Canada once trade talks broke down — and asked whether it would sour the mood at the summit.
Carney's answer was one word and then a reason. "These are all professionals." What matters, he said, is who is in the room: "One of the things at the summit, which is why it's important, is it's not just the headline assets that are managed by these institutions, the 120 trillion Canadian that are managed, but it's the fact that it's the decision makers who are coming to the summit."
"In many cases, they're managing money for doctors, nurses, firefighters, their pensioners, families, future generations in their countries," he said, which is why he expects them to be unmoved by the politics.
On the relationship: "We sometimes go through periods where there are tensions in that relationship." Provided the approach stays calm, he said, "we'll come to some agreement at some point."
Bonus Insights
On Europe, Carney said Canada is not seeking EU membership but a deeper strategic partnership, and pointed to one concrete result: "One of the manifestations of that strategic partnership is Canada becoming the only non-European member of SAFE, which is the defense procurement arrangement." He added, "It's a 150 billion euro procurement arrangement," and that "In effect, to simplify, we're treated as European for the purposes of that" — already visible, he said, in submarines and aircraft.
His definition of sovereignty is a list of capabilities, not a border: he said "sovereignty is determined by where you stand in a series of strategic capabilities in space, obviously in AI, in sovereign compute, in critical minerals, in energy, clean and conventional, and beyond." "No country can do that alone." The same integrations that create resilience, he warned, "can be used as leverage against you."
On whether the Europe partnership could reach free movement of workers: "You could see enhanced labor mobility, elements of enhanced labor mobility." He capped it — "Obviously, the four freedoms in Europe are tied together" — while pointing to education and research cooperation as easier wins. On the timetable: "Look, it's not going to be solved this week in Strasbourg, just to be clear. It's the start of a process, but it's the start of a high-ambition process."
He twice broke off to note where he was speaking. On allocations: "It's not, I mean, we're on Bloomberg, so I can say that." On the FINRA comparison: "Again, I'm on Bloomberg, so I can say this."
Carney's bottom line is that Canada's problem with global capital is fixable — a benchmark habit, slow approvals and tax — and that the logic he applies to trade and defense now applies to AI, where he wants an international coordinating body in place before national legislatures get around to writing the rules.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Cohere (The Canadian AI company Carney named as evidence that expertise exists outside the US and China, alongside his point that a lot of the foundational ideas in AI came out of Toronto)
Financial Stability Board (The post-crisis international body Carney says a "technology stability board" should be built along the lines of)
FINRA (The US broker-dealer self-regulator; Carney said the G7 discussed a US-led "FINRA-type organization for tech" as a stepping stone to something broader)
SAFE (The European defense procurement arrangement Carney says Canada has joined as its only non-European member, worth 150 billion euros)
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