OTTAWA — Former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper will deliver the closing speech at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first Canada Investment Summit on Tuesday.
A senior government source confirmed Harper’s rumored participation in the Liberal prime minister’s event to the National Post on Sunday.
The Canada Investment Summit in Toronto is Carney’s flagship event designed to attract foreign and domestic investors to invest in Canadian projects. As part of the presentation, the government circulated a list of more than 160 projects requiring investments ranging from $25 to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Harper’s participation is meant to send a message that attracting foreign capital to Canada is a cross-party endeavor, said the source, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely.
Harper, who has been in regular contact with Carney since the latter was elected prime minister last spring, is chairman of Alberta Investment Management Corp., the province’s pension plan that manages more than $200 billion.
More than a decade after leaving politics, Harper remains a revered figure in many conservative circles. As such, his participation in Carney’s flagship investment summit will be seen by many as a tacit endorsement of the Liberal government’s strategy to attract foreign investment and shift Canada’s economic dependence on the United States.
Harper’s speech is expected to be open to the media, a rarity for the former prime minister, who has given few speeches in the public domain since leaving politics.
Pension investment bodies will be actively involved in the Carney Investment Summit on Monday and Tuesday. The Prime Minister will give the evening’s opening speech and Harper will close it.
John Graham, president and CEO of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is also expected to give the keynote address.
Among the 250 invited guests from more than 25 countries expected to attend is the chairman of BlackRock Inc. Larry Fink, chief executive of Barclays PLC. KS Venkatakrishnan and senior managers of pension funds and sovereign wealth giants from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) to Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management.
A full list of participants for the invitation-only event has not yet been released. But a high-level program circulated by the government shows that teams will be created on critical minerals, defence, energy and artificial intelligence, as well as “frontier” technology projects.
National Post, with files from the Financial Post’s Barbara Schecter
cnardi@postmedia.com
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