Finance · Top Story
Published: September 14, 2026 at 6:00a.m. EDT From Hollywood agents to global pension fund executives, some of the world’s most deep pocketed players are in Toronto this week to do business. Prime Minister Mark Carney is hosting the first-ever Canada Investment Summit , while the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) takes place a few blocks away.
It’s the kind of executive gathering you’d typically expect to see in Davos or at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills. Interestingly, Milken is hosting its first-ever Toronto gathering the very same week as the Carney event. All told, it’s hard to recall such a big week for potential dealmaking in the city’s history.
And as Toronto plays host, Canada is hoping to capture some of the capital on hand. Carney’s been pretty clear about his intentions, having outlined a goal to catalyze $500 billion of private investment over five years as part of a broader push to attract $1 trillion in total investment to Canada. Ongoing trade tensions with the United States have created even higher stakes for the prime minister to make his case to foreign investors.
On some levels, the pitch is fairly compelling. It starts with the strength investors have seen in Canada’s stock market, despite trade uncertainty. Strong commodity-related performance and a reliable banking industry helped push the S&P/TSX to a series of record highs earlier this year.
Perhaps the movie star backdrop will also help lighten the mood and loosen the institutional investor purse strings. Worth noting, TIFF itself has taken steps to encourage more deals at the festival by hosting a marketplace for the first time in its 50-year history. It’s meant to fill the calendar gap between Cannes and Berlin, the two biggest film markets in the world.
And it comes on the heels of this year’s box office success from Canadian film industry standouts such as Elevation Pictures and IMAX. So from the creative to commodities, Canada has plenty of companies with international appeal. In fact, Ticker Take is co-hosting an event this week with the New York Stock Exchange, which will bring together senior leaders from global capital markets, film, media, and technology.
The tech industry will also be represented during an all-day event hosted by the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA). We’ve been told many times of late about how much economic uncertainty exists right now. But at the end of the day, there are always unknowns in business.
Capital doesn’t wait for politics to sort itself out. And Toronto’s event lineup this week speaks to that. Jon Erlichman is a BNN Bloomberg contributor and the host of Ticker Take on YouTube .
Source: BNN Bloomberg
