Canada’s private investment association has assembled a lineup of global investment heavyweights and prominent Canadian tech founders to convene in Toronto next month, as the industry seeks to make its case to international investors descending on the city for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit.
Cyrus Madon, chair of Brookfield Asset Management’s private equity group, is among those speaking at the Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) event—dubbed the Canadian Global Growth Forum—on Sept. 14. The CVCA also announced HarbourVest Partners CEO John Toomey and Camilla Languille, co-CEO of Mubadala’s private equity platform, an Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investment firm, as speakers, along with Paul Desmarais III, chairman and chief executive of Sagard, and Northleaf Capital Partners managing partner Stuart Waugh.
They’ll be joined by CEOs of some of Canada’s biggest tech companies, including Cohere’s Aidan Gomez, Wealthsimple’s Michael Katchen, Kepler Communications’ Mina Mitry and Ramtin Attar of Promise Robotics. The chief executives will discuss what they have built in Canada and the opportunity to grow companies in the country.
The invitation-only event is designed to give Canada’s private-investment industry access to a number of global investors arriving for the Canada Investment Summit, which begins with a gala dinner later that day. The main event is part of Carney’s effort to position Canada as a destination for global investment needed to back the massive projects Ottawa intends to build. Within five years, the government hopes to land $1 trillion in public and private investment.
Investment teams from the U.S., Gulf states, China, Malaysia, France and Australia are expected at the CVCA forum, where they’ll hold prearranged private meetings with Canadian fund managers.
The CVCA event and Carney’s summit are not formally linked. The Globe and Mail reported last week that the Canadian Global Growth Forum emerged from executives in Canada’s private equity and venture capital industry pushing Ottawa for a greater role in the government’s summit. Many of them had reportedly been left off its tightly controlled guest list, despite arguing that Canada’s mid-market companies make up the pipeline of businesses that can eventually attract the world’s biggest investment funds.
Carney’s gathering is expected to draw executives from nearly 100 investment organizations across 28 countries with collective assets under management of close to $120 trillion. The Milken Institute, the prestigious California-based think tank, will also hold a half-day conference in Toronto on Sept. 14, with TD chief executive Raymond Chun and RBC CEO Dave McKay among the Canadian business leaders scheduled to attend.