Toronto spent two days, September 14 and 15, hosting investors from nearly 30 countries who together manage more than $100 trillion in assets. What Canada walked away with was a headline figure of nearly $500 billion in commitments from the first Canada Investment Summit.
Read the list before the total, though. This is not one pool of foreign money. A large share comes from Canadian institutions being asked to put more of their capital to work at home, while Ottawa courts outside investors on top of that.
Who is putting up the money
The banks lead. TD committed $150 billion in financing over five years, spread across energy, critical minerals, defence and aerospace, digital and AI, and infrastructure. Scotiabank pledged more than $100 billion. CIBC offered $2 billion aimed at defence-related and dual-use small and medium-sized firms, and RBC nearly $1.5 billion for high-growth technology companies.
Pension funds, insurers and other institutions added nearly $100 billion. CPP Investments and Brookfield Asset Management launched a $50 billion Maple Fund for critical infrastructure and strategic industries. PSP Investments plans another $25 billion. Ontario Teachers’ committed $10 billion more by the end of 2027, and Sun Life $5 billion over five years.
Investment funds contributed more than $14 billion. Power Sustainable will invest and mobilize over $10 billion for power, grids, fibre, data and food supply chains, while Radical Ventures plans $4 billion through a new fund for Canadian AI scaleups.
The single biggest project came from Bell Canada and Saskatchewan: an AI infrastructure hub of up to $52.5 billion. The proposed 1.2-gigawatt site is expected to create more than 4,500 jobs across construction and operations.
The tax lever
Ottawa paired the summit with a proposal of its own. Its Productivity Mega Deduction would let businesses write off roughly two-thirds of eligible capital spending immediately, up from about 15% under the earlier Productivity Super-Deduction. Most qualifying assets bought on or after September 15, 2026 would count, from software and fibre-optic cable to mining property, pipelines, aircraft, rail track and roads. Most buildings and goodwill would not.
Finance Canada estimates the change would cut the effective tax rate on new business investment to 6.4% from 13.0%. It puts the U.S. rate at 16.9% and the OECD average, excluding Canada, at 19.0%. The price is steep: the government expects the measure to reduce tax revenue by $36 billion over five years. The Canada Revenue Agency has also begun giving priority to advance tax rulings on proposed investments of $1 billion or more, so investors can lock in tax treatment before committing.
Why the capital matters
Canada has a productivity problem to fix. Statistics Canada found investment per worker in 2022 was nearly 20% below its 2014 level, and real non-residential business investment in early 2024 sat 22% under its peak a decade earlier.
Some numbers are moving the right way. Foreign direct investment into Canada reached $96.8 billion in 2025, the highest since 2007. In the second quarter of 2026 it hit $25.9 billion, up from $18.8 billion in the first. And 43% of firms told the Bank of Canada they saw better productivity as an investment goal, compared with 31% a year earlier.
Whether a pledge turns into a data centre or a pipeline is the open question. The Bank of Canada has estimated that domestic pension funds, insurers, funds and banks hold about C$500 billion in private credit, much of it abroad. The summit’s bet is that some of that money can be brought home.
