FDI into and out of Canada

The Prime Minister announced a new sovereign wealth fund that will be used to attract foreign investment into Canada’s nation building projects.
Prime Minister Carney announced that Canada will hold our first ever investment summit this summer inviting 100 of the world’s largest investment institutions.

And this week, the full FDI numbers for 2025 were released by Statistics Canada.

We’ve been following the FDI numbers all year. We made them one of our 2026 charts to watch where we wrote that Canada’s foreign investment position abroad was double the FDI present in the country. We predicted Canada would try to close that gap and this week, the numbers show that the gap is narrowing.

The stock of FDI in Canada increased by $103 billion in 2025 while Canadian direct investment abroad rose by $65.9 billion. Statistics Canada said, “The difference between the stock of outward and inward direct investment—dropped for the first time since 2012.”

At a high level, the numbers are moving in the right direction. But Canada really needs to be more attentive to the types of FDI we are attracting and the ultimate intentions of the investors. As researchers have shown, FDI is just as likely to be extractive as it is beneficial, and countries like Canada need to be more strategic in how we are arranging FDI and making deals.

For example, last year merger and acquisition transactions were the largest contributor to the increase in FDI. In Q4, at least three Canadian firms were bought up by foreign investors meaning that the FDI being celebrated is also a prosperity leak sending valuable assets like data, intellectual property, profit and management expertise abroad for spillovers to accrue.

Attracting capital is an important component of Canada’s shift from reliance to resilience, but we need to be more strategic about what type of investments we are attracting and the conditions we place on them.