Stephen Harper to deliver closing speech at Carney’s Investment Summit

OTTAWA — Former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper will deliver the closing speech of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first Canada Investment Summit on Tuesday.

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A senior government source confirmed Harper’s long-rumoured participation in the Liberal prime minister’s event to National Post on Sunday.

The Canada Investment Summit in Toronto is Carney’s flagship event to pitch foreign and domestic investors on investing in Canadian projects. As part of the pitch, the government has circulated a list of over 160 projects that are seeking investments ranging from $25 million to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Harper’s participation is meant to send the message that attracting foreign capital to Canada is a cross-partisan exercise, said the source who requested anonymity to speak freely.

Harper, who speaks to Carney regularly since the latter was elected prime minister last spring, is the chairman of the Alberta Investment Management Corp, the province’s pension plan that manages over $200 billion.

Over one decade since leaving politics, Harper remains a venerated figure in many conservative circles. So, his participation in Carney’s flagship investment summit will be perceived by many as a tacit endorsement of the Liberal government’s strategy to attract foreign investment and shift Canada’s economic dependency away from the U.S.

Harper’s speech is expected to be open to media, a rarity for the former prime minister who has delivered few open-access speeches since leaving politics.

Pension investment bodies will feature heavily during Carney’s Investment Summit that will be held Monday and Tuesday. The prime minister will deliver the opening speech for the evening and Harper will close it.

John Graham, the president and CEO of Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, is also expected to deliver a keynote speech.

Among the 250 invited guests from more than 25 nations expected to attend are BlackRock Inc. chairman Larry Fink, Barclays PLC chief executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan and senior managers of pension funds and sovereign wealth giants from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) to Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management.

A full list of attendees to the invitation-only event has not yet been released. But a high-level program circulated by the government shows there will be panels on critical mineral, defence, energy and artificial intelligence and “frontier” technology projects.

National Post, with files from Financial Post’s Barbara Shecter

cnardi@postmedia.com

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