Prime Minister Mark Carney met potential investment partners in Singapore on Tuesday as his first official visit to Asia entered its second phase.
The brief stop in Singapore comes between Carney’s trips to two economic summits, where he will present Canada as a reliable trading partner for Southeast Asia and as an attractive location for investment.
On Sunday, he told a business audience in Malaysia that Canada has learned over the past year that “we need to build at scale at home.” He said Canada needs about half a trillion dollars in investments “in many of the areas that I think a lot of the investors and businesses here would find attractive.”
Global Affairs Canada said Singapore led Southeast Asia as the region’s largest source of foreign direct investment into Canada in 2024, with $9 billion. The country is home to many major international investors and funds that have had previous contact with Carney.
On Tuesday, the prime minister held a series of private meetings with sovereign wealth fund executives, including the head of the Singapore Government Investment Corporation, which has investments in Canada. He also met with the current and former CEOs of Temasek, a state-owned global investment company that has invested in Canadian carbon capture technology.
The Prime Minister’s Office said Carney planned to encourage greater investment in areas such as artificial intelligence, clean technology, critical minerals and nation-building projects in Canada.
He also toured the facilities of the port operator PSA Internacional and met with its general director. The company has terminals in British Columbia and Halifax, and Carney’s office said it planned to “encourage PSA International to capitalize on Canada’s upcoming national construction projects.”
Carney’s visit to Singapore comes after his plans to visit Japan were nixed by political changes in Tokyo.
Senior Canadian officials, who were authorized to brief the media about Carney’s trip on condition of anonymity, suggested the prime minister would likely have visited Japan this week if the country’s coalition government had not collapsed earlier this month.
US President Donald Trump also visited Japan on Tuesday and met with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who took office last week.
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Takaichi could meet Carney at the APEC summit in South Korea, which the prime minister is scheduled to attend starting Thursday.
Carney began the trip in Malaysia at the summit of leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, known as ASEAN.
The 11-nation bloc includes some of the world’s fastest-growing economies, including Singapore. Most of the group’s members constantly navigate the superpower rivalry between the United States and China.
Stéphanie Martel, a professor specializing in Southeast Asia at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., said Ottawa needs to demonstrate its relevance if it wants to secure investment and trade from the region.
“Canada probably needs ASEAN a lot more than we need it, and they know it, but I don’t think we necessarily know it,” Martel said. “They have much more important things to do, so we need to make strong and compelling arguments about (our) added value.”
Carney’s visit attempts to build on the Indo-Pacific strategy the Liberal government launched three years ago, which promised 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 the Canadian economy faces from U.S. tariffs. But he 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 little concerned that we’re again forgetting the need – even as we think about securing those trade and investment benefits – to really provide this vision that Canada is a reliable and constructive partner across the board,” he said.
Martel said that is increasingly important for all parties struggling with Trump’s trade and security policies.
“For our partners in the region, it is also becoming very clear that the United States is unpredictable, unreliable and destabilizing. And this will lead them to lean towards China out of necessity, and only China will be happy with that situation,” he said.
“There is also a window of opportunity for Canada – among other partners that are equally interested in preserving predictability, common rules in trade and elsewhere – to help alleviate some of that pressure.”
While ASEAN declared Canada a strategic partner in 2023, it was left out of a comprehensive partnership that would include it in ASEAN talks on issues such as defence.
“We’ve been adamant for years that we want to get access to them, but we haven’t been able to make a strong case for what we hope to accomplish by 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 agreed to push for a deeper partnership with Canada that includes trade, research, education and investment.
Canada and ASEAN have pushed back the timeline for completing a trade deal. That deal was supposed to be signed this year, but was delayed until next year.
Martel said the delay is not surprising, since the ASEAN bloc includes countries with very different interests and levels of development. He said it was smart for Canada to sign a separate agreement 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,” he said.
Carney has also met with leaders he is likely to see on the summit circuit next year. He met with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., before the Philippines hosts 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.
© 2025 The Canadian Press
