Canada has a rare economic embarrassment: a foreign investor says it wants to deploy tens of billions of dollars, but Ottawa’s project pipeline is not ready to take the money.
The mismatch sits at the center of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s attempt to turn Canada into a faster, more independent investment destination. In November 2025, Canada welcomed what it called the United Arab Emirates’ “historic decision” to invest $70 billion in Canada, with discussions focused on critical minerals, energy, ports and artificial intelligence.
Seven months later, the Financial Times reported that Canada’s Major Projects Office told an official UAE delegation in mid-June that it was too early to inject the capital because Canada lacked projects ready for deployment. The FT attributed the account to three officials speaking anonymously.
The government’s own numbers show the ambition. Carney’s office said in November that Canada aimed to double non-US exports over the next decade and “unleash $1 trillion” in new investment over five years. In April, the government said it had secured more than 20 new economic and defence partnerships and $97 billion in foreign investment commitments.
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The UAE pledge accounts for most of that disclosed foreign-investment figure. If it remains undeployed, Carney’s capital-attraction story risks turning into a capacity story.
The Major Projects Office was built to solve that problem. But speed is not the same as investability. Large infrastructure investors generally need defined assets, regulatory paths, ownership structures, offtake agreements, Indigenous consultation frameworks, and credible construction timelines before capital can move.
The FT report indicates Canada’s challenge is not that UAE officials lack interest, but that Ottawa has not yet produced enough projects at the right stage.
Canada has started naming possible channels. The UAE agreement was tied publicly to critical minerals, energy, ports and AI. The government’s September 2026 Canada Investment Summit in Toronto is also designed to attract capital into clean energy, critical minerals, new technologies and artificial intelligence.
But those sectors also carry the policy conflicts that have slowed major Canadian projects for years: federal-provincial jurisdiction, emissions rules, Indigenous rights, permitting risk, community opposition and uncertain project economics.
The clearest near-term candidate for major foreign capital may be energy infrastructure, but it also shows why deployment is difficult.
On July 2, Canada and Alberta announced plans for a new 1 million-barrel-per-day pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific coast, designed to expand Asian export access and reduce reliance on the US market. Construction could reportedly begin as early as September 2027, with the project built by government-owned Trans Mountain Corp. in coordination with Pembina Pipeline Corp.
Canada’s last major pipeline lesson was expensive. Ottawa bought the Trans Mountain system for $4.5 billion in 2018 after Kinder Morgan threatened to cancel the expansion, and delays and overruns pushed the expansion cost to $34 billion.
Power infrastructure tells the same story. Reuters reported that Carney’s government plans to double national power generation and grid capacity by 2050 at an estimated cost of $1 trillion. The strategy creates room for renewables, hydro, nuclear and gas-fired power, but it also depends on long timelines, regional coordination and federal tools such as investment tax credits and the Canada Infrastructure Bank.
For the UAE, that means the Canadian opportunity is large but not immediately liquid.
