A summit is a speech with better catering. I have spent enough time inside the machinery where capital meets policy to know that before the executives land back home, the commitments are already softening.
A government stages a spectacle. Executives fly in. Cameras roll. Commitments get announced in round numbers. Everyone goes home feeling like the country just turned a corner.
Prime Minister Carney’s investment summit followed the script precisely. Roughly 250 financial heavyweights in one room, collectively managing close to $120 trillion in assets, assembled around the goal of catalyzing $1 trillion in investment over five years.
That is real convening power. I give him credit for it.
The problem sits underneath the stage. You can market a house to new residents all you want. If the plumbing is broken, they will tour the property, nod politely, and buy somewhere else. Canada’s innovation plumbing is broken, and the summit addressed none of it.
The Summit Sold a Country That Does Not Yet Exist
Here is the gap the summit papered over. Canada ranks 17th out of 139 countries in the 2025 Global Innovation Index, dragged down by weak scores in patenting, scale-up success, licensing income, and the economic value extracted from academic discoveries.
Investors managing $120 trillion read these rankings before they board the plane. They know the difference between a country that generates ideas and a country that owns the companies those ideas become.
Capital follows incentive structure, not opportunity alone. I have watched billions redirect themselves the moment a tax mechanism changed, and I have watched billions sit on the sidelines while governments gave speeches. A summit is a speech with better catering.
The question investors actually ask is structural. They want to know whether Canada converts research into companies, whether those companies stay, and whether the ownership upside remains in the jurisdiction. On all three counts, the answer right now embarrasses us.
Where the Pipeline Actually Breaks
John Rapley made the essential point in The Globe and Mail this week. Canada’s public schools rank among the best in the world. Our undergraduate system produces genuinely strong talent. Then the innovation pipeline dries up exactly where it should accelerate.
Move past the bachelor’s degree and the system fails.
Canadian universities underperform badly at producing master’s and PhD graduates who form businesses. The numbers make the breakdown visible. Only 5.5 percent of university graduates become entrepreneurs, and a mere 1.9 percent achieve business ownership three years after graduation.
This is where the commercialization collapse shows up in hard figures.
112 vs. 941. Canadian universities formed 112 startups in 2024. American universities formed 941. That ratio is the commercialization gap made visible.
In 2024, Canadian institutions formed only 112 university startups compared to 941 in the United States. Canadian university research spending rose nearly 6 percent to $8.4 billion in 2025, yet licensing income fell 4 percent, active licenses declined 8 percent, and university-linked startup shutdowns rose 65 percent.
Read that again. Research spending went up. Commercial output went down. We are pouring more money into the top of a pipeline that leaks at every joint below it.
This is a structural incubation failure, and no quantity of foreign investment commitments fixes it.
Capital follows incentive structure, not opportunity alone. A summit is a speech with better catering.
The Ownership Question Nobody Asked at the Summit
Here is the layer of this problem that gets overlooked in almost every policy conversation I sit in.
Even when Canadian innovation does get funded, the ownership increasingly sits elsewhere. Fully 53 percent of all venture capital invested in Canada comes from the United States, and one in four STEM graduates from top Canadian universities works outside the country.
Foreign decision-makers now control over half of Canada’s innovation capital allocation. That determines where head offices land, where senior teams get built, where strategic decisions get made, and where the wealth from Canadian ideas accumulates.
Ownership determines everything. Who builds, who stays, who profits, who leaves. I have made this argument in rooms with finance ministers and in rooms with founders, and the logic holds in both.
Economic sovereignty means keeping the value you create. A summit designed to attract more foreign capital into a system that already exports more than half its ownership upside deepens the dependency it claims to solve.
You cannot market your way out of a structural problem. You have to engineer your way out.
What an Incubator Nation Actually Requires
Rapley’s framing is the right one. The job in front of every level of government is remodeling the house to accommodate new residents. Here is what that remodel requires, in sequence.
Every Master’s Thesis That Doesn’t Become a Company Is a Write-Off
The infrastructure gap at the point of company formation is specific and documented. Among Canadian higher education institutions, 40 percent had no external links to investors, half had no links to professional service providers, and over 75 percent had no incubators to support new ventures.
This is the exact point where a master’s thesis should become a company and instead becomes a résumé line on a job application in Boston. The demand exists. Eighty percent of institutions report significant graduate interest in entrepreneurship. The scaffolding to convert that interest into firms is simply missing.
Research Spending Without Commercial Output Is a Subsidy to Foreign Acquirers
Canada ranked second in the G7 for higher education research intensity, yet advanced industries fell from 10 percent of the economy in 1995 to 6.9 percent in 2022. We invest more per capita in university research than almost any peer and extract far less commercial output per dollar. Upstream incentives push universities toward publication counts. They need to push toward companies, licenses, and retained intellectual property.
Without Domestic Capital Mechanisms, Canadians Fund Everyone Else’s Upside
This is where my own work sits, and where I see the clearest proven path. Canada already knows how to redirect private risk capital into strategically important sectors. Flow-through shares did exactly that for mining exploration. The UK’s EIS and SEIS schemes did it for early-stage companies, with a third or more of that capital flowing into technology firms.
The mechanics are portable. Extend tax-smart investment structures to early-stage technology, and you give millions of Canadians a direct incentive to fund the companies forming in their own country. You broaden ownership at the exact stage where foreign capital currently captures the upside.
The Cost of Waiting Is Already on the Books
I want to be fair to Carney. Convening $120 trillion worth of attention is a legitimate opening move, and marketing Canada as a destination has a role in any serious strategy.
An opening move only matters if the follow-through exists. Right now the follow-through is absent, and the costs compound every quarter we delay.
Every graduate who builds their company in Austin instead of Toronto is a cost. Every university patent licensed to a foreign acquirer is a cost. Every Canadian startup whose cap table is majority foreign-owned by Series B is a cost. These losses are already on the books. The summit did nothing to stop the bleeding.
The best advocacy shows what is already being lost. So here is the ledger: 112 startups against America’s 941, a 65 percent rise in university-linked shutdowns, half our venture capital controlled from abroad, a quarter of our best STEM graduates building someone else’s economy.
The remodel requires government at every level to do the unglamorous work. Build the incubation infrastructure universities lack. Realign research incentives toward commercialization. Install the capital mechanisms that let Canadians own Canadian innovation.
None of it photographs well. All of it determines whether the $1 trillion ever arrives, and whether Canadians own any of what it builds.
Carney held the summit. The real test is what he builds now that the cameras have left. You should judge him on the plumbing, because that is where the next decade of Canadian ownership gets decided.
If you are working on Canadian innovation policy, capital structure, or the mechanisms that keep IP and ownership onshore — I want to hear from you. The architecture is buildable. The question is whether the people in position to build it move before the next summit steals the headlines.
