OTTAWA, ON — Taking place in Toronto on September 14 and 15, Canada Investment Summit 2026 is a forum convened by the Prime Minister with CPP Investments and PSP Investments to put major Canadian opportunities in technology, defence, energy, critical minerals and advanced manufacturing in front of the world’s largest institutional investors. 

Invest Ottawa President and CEO Sonya Shorey was invited to the Summit’s Welcome Reception on Sunday, September 13, joining the room with Prime Minister Mark Carney, global investors, and industry and government leaders ahead of the two-day program. She published her reflections that evening. 

“There are moments when a country has the opportunity to reshape its economic trajectory. This is one,” Shorey wrote in her post. 

She framed the moment by the conditions that surround it. Investment is in motion, alliances are in flux, and technology is redrawing the line between economic and national security, while countries compete harder than ever for investment, talent and companies. 

“Canada has a choice,” she wrote. “We can navigate this change. Or we can seize it.” 

Investment as catalyst, not destination 

The Summit sets out to mobilize more than $1 trillion in investment over five years. Shorey’s point is that an ambition of that size is about far more than the capital. It is a chance to build the productive capacity, companies, technologies and industries that will determine how Canada competes for decades. 

“Investment cannot be the destination,” Shorey noted. “It must be the catalyst.” 

She set out what that means in practice: “A catalyst for Canadian companies to scale. For Canadian technologies to reach global markets. For ideas and intellectual property created here to become industries anchored here. For procurement to create customers and commercialization opportunities. For strategic investment to strengthen our economic and national security.”

The procurement point is the one founders feel most. Capital alone does not create a customer, a company scales when someone buys what it makes, and for founders and scale-ups in the Capital Region, that is the harder problem. 

Canada’s Capital fuels this national ambition  

The national opportunity, in her reading, runs through the Capital Region. Ottawa sits at a powerful intersection. Technology, government, national security, research, global diplomacy and talent sit side by side, alongside deep capability in defence and dual-use technologies, AI, semiconductors and photonics, cyber, quantum, space, autonomy and next-generation communications. 

As Shorey wrote: “Our greatest advantage is not any one sector. It is the convergence of them.” 

Turning that convergence into Canadian advantage is the region’s opportunity, as she frames it: drawing global capital and companies while scaling the ones already here, linking innovation to customers, building sovereign industrial capacity, and keeping talent and intellectual property in the country as companies grow. 

The measure of success 

“Ultimately, the measure of this Summit will not be the capital represented or even the capital invested,” Shorey wrote. “It will be the capacity Canada builds, and the impact it achieves.” 

Shorey closed her post where the Summit’s own ambition points: 

“Canada already has extraordinary assets, talent and technologies. This is our moment to put them to work at scale. To build with ambition. To compete with confidence. And to turn Canadian potential into global impact. 

Build Canada. Together.” 

---

Invest Ottawa is the economic development and foreign direct investment agency for Canada’s Capital. Building here or considering it?  See how we support founders and growing companies.