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Mark Carney will be the first Canadian prime minister to visit the United Arab Emirates in more than 40 years.Edgar Su/Reuters
Mark Carney will be hunting big game during his two-day visit to the United Arab Emirates later this week, seeking to build relationships with massive investment funds and deep-pocketed companies as Canada looks beyond the United States for economic growth.
The Prime Minister hopes wealthy Gulf investors will see new value in Canada now that Ottawa is pledging to speed up approvals for major resource and infrastructure projects.
The Gulf region, with its trillions of investment capital, is one of several priority regions for Canada, along with Europe and Asia, as it seeks to diversify trade away from the increasingly unreliable U.S. under President Donald Trump, and attract foreign investment in energy, infrastructure, artificial intelligence and resources.
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Mr. Carney will be meeting with United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, as well as key business leaders and heads of major investment funds headquartered there. The Prime Minister’s Office is withholding details of meetings until Thursday local time in the UAE.
Some of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds are based in the UAE, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) with more than US$1-trillion in assets.
A senior Canadian official said the government believes UAE fund managers consider themselves overweighted in U.S. investments and are looking to diversify their portfolios to a stable Group of Seven economy with lots of energy holdings and trade agreements both in Asia and Europe. They’ve read about Mr. Carney’s efforts to expedite major projects, but Ottawa believes they want to verify what they’ve heard by speaking to the Prime Minister personally.
Mr. Carney will be the first Canadian prime minister to visit the Emirates since Pierre Trudeau in 1983.
The official, whom The Globe and Mail is not identifying because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said this visit matters because the UAE economy is very much driven by personal relationships – the kind that benefit from face-to-face meetings.
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Asked for an example of the kind of investment Mr. Carney is looking for, the official cited the 2009 purchase of Nova Chemicals by International Petroleum Investment Co. (IPIC), a state-owned sovereign wealth fund from the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. IPIC was later merged with Mubadala Development Co. in 2017 to form the new entity, Mubadala Investment Co.
The UAE has also shown keen interest in AI and quantum computing. In October, federal AI Minister Evan Solomon signed a non-binding deal in Abu Dhabi to explore investment opportunities related to AI, with an eye to attracting capital from the Middle Eastern country to build data centres in Canada.
The Carney government doesn’t appear hesitant about foreign investment from the autocratic UAE, where, according to a recent report from Freedom House, “political parties are banned, and all executive, legislative, and judicial authority ultimately rests with the seven hereditary rulers.”
Human Rights Watch researcher Joey Shea told a European parliamentary committee this month the UAE has a “zero-tolerance policy” for public dissent. “Scores of critics are serving lengthy sentences following massively unfair trials, and are often held in dismal conditions, including overcrowding and lack of adequate medical care,” she told the committee.
Where Canada has blocked investment, particularly linked to state organizations, from countries such as China, there appear to be no red lines that UAE investment might encounter. The Canadian official said the government couldn’t prejudge the investment review process but added the UAE is not on any short list of countries from which Ottawa would be nervous about approving investments.
The Prime Minister’s plane arrives in the UAE in the late evening Wednesday local time, and after a full day Thursday and a partial day Friday, he will depart for the Group of 20 summit in South Africa.
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Mr. Carney’s stopover has been highly anticipated in the UAE, where some Canadian companies held meetings in advance of his arrival.
Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne told a Toronto business audience Nov. 13 that “funds are chasing us, literally, to say they want to be overweighted in Canada,” and calling to ask about potentially getting involved in infrastructure initiatives backed by the new Major Projects Office.
“If you look at the world, it’s a pretty patchy set of circumstances,” Mr. Champagne said, and Canada is pitching itself as a reliable partner for new investment with trade ties to the U.S. and Europe.
The closed-door talks scheduled with large investors in the Emirates are being framed as a kind of diplomacy through investment, built on relationships that Canada has not always focused on nurturing in the region.
The UAE was Canada’s 16th-largest export market in 2024, with $3.4-billion of two-way trade, according to Statistics Canada. Foreign direct investment in Canada from the UAE totalled $8.8-billion.
Sovereign wealth funds managed by the UAE – such as ADIA and the US$330-billion Mubadala – as well as those in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait offer huge pools of untapped investment potential for Canada. And a trip to Dubai or Abu Dhabi provides a crash course in the breakneck pace of investment and new construction in the region, in stark contrast to Canada’s reputation for slow-moving approvals and development.
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Mr. Carney arrives with a high profile and strong relationships that he built first as a central banker, and more recently as the head of transition investing at Brookfield Asset Management Ltd., the US$1-trillion asset manager with deep roots in Canada.
Brookfield has been active in the region for years, even before Mr. Carney joined the company, and unsentimental about forging large-scale joint ventures in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia that secured billions of dollars in commitments to its funds.
The company held unrelated, high-level business meetings in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia in recent days, before the Prime Minister’s arrival, but it will not take part in events connected to his visit.
In his private-sector role, Mr. Carney was instrumental in securing two major funding commitments from ALTÉRRA, the UAE’s US$30-billion private climate investment vehicle. ALTÉRRA pledged US$2-billion for the second Brookfield Global Transition Fund, valued at US$20-billion, and made a US$1-billion anchor investment in a separate fund for clean energy investments in emerging markets, which aims to raise US$5-billion by next year.
At the time, Mr. Carney worked closely with ALTÉRRA CEO Majid Al Suwaidi, who was also director-general of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai when Mr. Carney was the United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance. Mr. Al Suwaidi was a previously a graduate student at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
The UAE’s Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, is chair of ALTÉRRA and also played a role in deals that Mr. Carney helped Brookfield broker.
With a report from Jason Kirby
