Prime Minister Mark Carney met with potential investment partners in Singapore on Tuesday as his first official visit to Asia entered its second phase.
The brief stopover in Singapore comes between Carney's trips to two economic summits, where he is pitching Canada as a reliable trading partner for Southeast Asia and as an attractive place for investment.
On Sunday, he told a business audience in Malaysia that Canada has learned over the last year that "we need to build at scale at home." He said Canada needs roughly half a trillion dollars in investment "in many of the areas that I think many of the investors and businesses here would find attractive."
Global Affairs Canada said Singapore led Southeast Asia as the region's biggest source of foreign direct investment in Canada in 2024, at $9 billion. The country is home to many heavyweight international investors and funds that have had prior contact with Carney.
On Tuesday, the prime minister had a series of private meetings with executives from sovereign wealth funds, including the head of the Government of Singapore Investment Corp., which has investments in Canada. He also met with the current and former CEOs of Temasek, a state-owned global investment company which has invested in Canadian carbon capture technology.
The Prime Minister's Office said Carney planned to encourage more investment in areas like AI, clean technology, critical minerals and nation-building projects in Canada.
He also toured the facilities of port operator PSA International and met with its CEO. The company has terminals in British Columbia and Halifax, and Carney's office said he planned to "encourage PSA International to capitalize on Canada’s upcoming nation-building projects."
Carney's visit to Singapore comes after plans for him to visit Japan were overturned by political shifts in Tokyo.
Senior Canadian officials, who were authorized to brief media about Carney's trip on the condition they not be named, suggested the prime minister likely would have visited Japan instead this week had the country's coalition government not collapsed earlier this month.
U.S. President Donald Trump also visited Japan on Tuesday and met with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office just last week.
Takaichi might meet with Carney at the APEC summit in South Korea, which the prime minister is scheduled to attend starting on Thursday.
Carney began the trip in Malaysia at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations leaders summit, known as ASEAN.
The 11-country block includes some of the world's fastest-growing economies, including Singapore. Most of the group's members are constantly navigating the superpower rivalry between the U.S. and China.
Stéphanie Martel, a professor specializing in Southeast Asia at Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., said Ottawa needs to prove its relevance if it wants to secure investment and trade from the region.
"Canada probably needs ASEAN way more than it needs us — and they know it, but I don't think we necessarily do," said Martel. "They have much bigger fish to fry, so we need to actually make a strong and convincing case about (our) added value."
Carney's visit attempts to build on the Indo-Pacific strategy the Liberal government released three years ago, which pledged closer partnerships in Southeast Asia.
The strategy repeatedly noted that many in the region believe Ottawa has been engaging inconsistently, with periods of intense outreach followed by years of silence.
Martel said it makes sense for Carney to focus on trade, given the pressures facing Canada's economy from U.S. tariffs. But she said he also needs to talk about broader issues, such as security and climate change, that resonate with people in Southeast Asia.
"I'm a bit concerned that we're again forgetting the necessity — including when thinking about securing those trade and investment gains — of really providing this view of Canada being a reliable and constructive partner, across the board," she said.
Martel said that's increasingly important for all parties grappling with Trump's trade and security policies.
"For our partners in the region, it's also becoming crystal clear that the United States is unpredictable, unreliable and destabilizing. And this will lead them to skew towards China out of necessity, and only China will be happy about that situation," she said.
"There is also a window of opportunity for Canada — among other partners that are similarly invested in the preservation of predictability, common rules in trade and other domains — to help alleviate some of that pressure."
While ASEAN declared Canada a strategic partner in 2023, it has been left out of a comprehensive partnership that would include it in ASEAN talks on issues like defence.
"We've been adamant for years that we want to gain access to those, but we haven't been able to make a strong case for what we hope to accomplish being there and how we can contribute," Martel said.
Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim told Carney at the start of a bilateral meeting Monday that his cabinet has agreed to push for a deeper partnership with Canada that includes trade, research and education and investment.
Canada and ASEAN have pushed back the timeline for completing a trade agreement. That deal was supposed to be signed this year but has been delayed to next year.
Martel said the delay isn't surprising, since the ASEAN bloc includes countries with vastly different interests and levels of development. She said it was smart for Canada to sign a separate deal with Indonesia this year and announce plans to accelerate trade talks with the Philippines.
"This is clearly the pragmatic approach, to develop negotiations on the multilateral and bilateral sides," she said.
Carney has also been meeting with leaders he's likely to see on the summit circuit next year. He met with Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., ahead of the Philippines hosting the ASEAN summit next year.
Carney also plans to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week at the APEC summit in Korea. China will host the APEC summit next year.
Picture Courtesy: THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
