Carney asks money managers holding $70 trillion for about 1% of it over five years

Carney's C$1 trillion goal converts to $720 billion, and the asset managers arriving in Toronto oversee more than $70 trillion between them, so the five-year target is 1.03% of the money in the room ^[12][6][1]. Annually that is about a fifth of a percent ^[6], or C$200 billion a year of new investment, roughly $144 billion ^[2]. The target counts government money alongside private dollars, and Bloomberg's account does not break the split ^[12]. "There are very few people who get up in the morning and think about Canada," Carney has said ^[13].

The cost side is smaller and easier to size. A 50% duty on $20 billion of goods is $10 billion a year if volumes hold, and at that rate a good deal of it stops moving instead ^[3]. Jobs data already point to strain in auto parts and forestry, in what the account calls the world's 10th-biggest economy ^[2][3]. The annual investment target is about 14 times the gross duty bill ^[4].

Investors get a prospectus of more than 160 projects needing hundreds of billions of dollars, spanning data centres, advanced manufacturing, LNG terminals, ports and dozens of mines ^[9]. Take the lowest reading of that phrase, $200 billion, and the projects average $1.25 billion each ^[5]. "Canada is one of the most connected economies in the world. We have trade deals covering 1.5 billion consumers," Carney said in an interview with Bloomberg News ^[8]. "We have a super-cycle of investment opportunity that I just have not seen in my career," Toronto-Dominion Bank chief executive Raymond Chun said ^[10].

Growth in per capita GDP has lagged other major economies on weak business investment and stubbornly low productivity gains ^[16]. Some investors had come to see Canada as an unpredictable place to put money after high-profile resource projects were delayed, rejected or abandoned ^[17]. Heather Exner-Pirot of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute said the country's "investability reputation was severely harmed" during Justin Trudeau's decade in office ^[18]. She recalled New York investors derisively calling the 2019 Impact Assessment Act the "Don't Invest in Canada Act" ^[19]. Carney does not dispute the diagnosis. "We've been slow on moving on a series of areas with respect to regulatory approvals and other factors," he said ^[20].

Carney entered politics last year and rode anti-Trump sentiment to a surprise fourth straight Liberal win ^[15]. That goodwill is finite, and he is spending it on privatizing airports and rewriting tax and regulatory rules ^[4], not on a negotiated tariff settlement; he walked away from the talks with Trump ^[5]. Measures to speed approvals went in last year, and more are promised: "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," Carney said ^[21].

I would price this as a list of intentions until a number is signed, since none of Blackstone, Temasek or Apollo Global Management has committed an amount, according to Bloomberg ^[7][22]. Chun said he could not recall another time a similar group of the world's leading asset managers met to discuss investing in Canada ^[11]. Statutory change to the 2019 review law among the measures Carney promised for the coming weeks would settle it. So would a named fund putting a dollar figure against one of the 160 projects.