The Canada Investment Summit — dinner Monday night, meetings all day Tuesday — was always going to be an important test for the Carney government. “A premier platform to showcase Canada as a compelling investment destination and a trusted convener of global capital,” it says on the summit website (which offers little other information: If you have to ask, as Louis Armstrong said about jazz, you’ll never know).
The “Prospectus” that’s been making the rounds — 66 pages, 160 projects, some with price tags running to the tens of billions of dollars — was the most exclusive document in Ottawa last week, for a minute. Who do I ask for a copy, I asked somebody in François-Philippe Champagne’s office, after colleagues at the Globe, Star and CBC got the jump on me. “Certainly not us,” came the shocked reply. Within hours copies of the thing were practically falling from the trees. People who couldn’t get a copy for love or money suddenly had three in their inbox. “This investment pitchbook is intended for internal use only and should not be copied, shared, reproduced, distributed, quoted, or otherwise disclosed, in whole or in part, without prior written consent,” said the Disclaimer page on the year’s most copied, shared, reproduced, distributed, quoted and disclosed document.
For months, Carney advisors have been saying the Summit will begin conversations, not announce deals. That’s going to be a communications challenge — the “He’s come up empty-handed again!” video practically shoots itself — but reading this Prospectus, I start to believe it. The bulk of the prospectus is a series of panels, each describing a major infrastructure project in a few paragraphs and telling prospective investors whom to contact for more information. Got a spare $US57 billion? Here’s your chance to expand the Port of Churchill in Manitoba:
Don’t bet on any dredging boats docking at Churchill by mid-week. A bigger Port of Churchill might open the heart of the continent to shipping on a scale we can hardly imagine, but so far imagining’s all we’ve got. The latest announcement about the site from the feds, in February, concerned “the launch of a market sounding study to gather industry input on the long-term growth potential” of the port. This is not the sort of language that gets Nordic pension funds blowing the dust off their wallets. More encouraging is the Ksi Lsims LNG Terminal in BC, which you’ve heard of if you’re a paid-up member of the Major Projects Fan Club. “Fully permitted and shovel-ready” is what an investor likes to hear:
Not surprisingly, the approach of an Investment Summit hosted by the second-most famous Canadian after Jamil Jivani has generated a lot of thinking and writing about what informs the decisions of very large institutional investors, and whether Canada can get any of that action. I’ve been reading up. To the extent there’s a consensus, it’s that Canada is unusually successful in keeping investors who’ve already backed projects here; that those projects are, by the standards of sovereign-wealth funds, pretty small; and that there’s work ahead if Canada is to become a frequent destination for very large windfalls of international cash.
Let’s look at the reading list.