Adam Radwanski: Mark Carney’s airport privatization pitch was a misstep, at an otherwise successful summit - Toronto Star

Making the airport privatization announcement at his signature gathering distracted from the main message of the summit, argues Adam Radwanski.

A Westjet Boeing 737-7CT lands at Pearson International Airport last March.

Adam Radwanski is a business columnist for the Star, focused on the intersection of the economy, politics and public policy. Reach him via email: aradwanski@thestar.ca

If Mark Carney comes to regret anything out of his landmark foreign-investment summit, it’ll be using his keynote speech to announce his airport privatization plans.

That news probably didn’t come as a shock to many of the elite folks in the room, since there was advance chatter that he’d signal next steps for taking that infrastructure out of public hands.

But it nevertheless distracted from the main message at the prime minister’s signature gathering. And it invites backlash, within Canada, that his pitch to the world wouldn’t otherwise warrant.

At Canada’s first-ever investment summit in Toronto, Prime Minister Mark Carney says he wants to see private investors operate Canada's four largest airports. (Sept. 15, 2026)

For the most part, this has been an event that should set to rest concerns of selling out, and get Canadians excited about how their country could grow in the years ahead. That’s because almost the entire thing has been about attracting investment to build new things, rather than ceding control of what we already have.

You could see that in the prospectus distributed in advance to attendees. All 167 projects that it pitches, from mines to pipelines to nuclear generators to AI infrastructure, involve either creating new assets or expanding existing ones. And they mostly have Canadian proponents, with the idea being to attract equity stakes or other forms of financing to help make them real.

Carney’s other big announcement during his Tuesday morning address — a sweeping expansion of tax write-offs for capital spending, touted as getting the marginal effective tax rate lower than in any other major advanced economy — hit that theme as well. 

So, too, did investment announcements that his government lined up in advance and rolled out at the summit to show momentum — among them a $50-billion infrastructure fund jointly launched by the Canada Pension Plan and Brookfield Asset Management, a TD Bank commitment to provide $150-billion in financing for key strategic sectors, and similar pledges of $100-billion by Scotiabank and $70-billion by BMO.