Prime Minister Mark Carney says Ottawa is working on a $1 billion project aimed at expanding critical minerals processing capacity in Canada, while securing the equivalent of $70 billion in investment from the United Arab Emirates.
The announcements come as Carney concluded a visit to Abu Dhabi, which focused heavily on trade amid concerns about the war in Sudan.
“I’m pleased that an agreement valued over $1 billion is in the process of being finalized,” Carney said in a Friday morning speech to the Canada-UAE Business Council.
“(It) will expand critical minerals processing capacity in Canada, creating jobs, boosting (the) long-term supply of minerals essential to energy technologies and advanced manufacturing. More on that soon,” he said.
Carney said that the new project is a matter of economic growth and human development.
“We are a global leader in AI, in quantum and life sciences. And we realize it’s time to begin to commercialize these strengths, for the benefit of humanity,” Carney said.
The prime minister personally invited Emirati investors to visit him in Canada, to help spur more major projects, after announcing this week the signing of an investment-protection pact and the launch of trade negotiations.
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“We welcome UAE investors to visit Canada — I will personally host them — to explore investment in Canada’s transformative projects,” he said.
To that end, Carney’s office said Friday that the UAE had agreed to invest $50 billion USD in Canada.
The UAE foreign ministry had not published a notice of the deal, but media reporting suggests the funding will include energy, AI logistics, mining and other strategic industries.
Carney’s office said the funding is part of a bilateral investment framework agreement, and did not indicate what timeline under which the dollars would flow.
His office says the funding is a vote of confidence in the Canadian economy, which has been suffering from the U.S. trade war and productivity issues.
In his speech Friday, Carney said he is “very confident” that Canada and the UAE can more than double trade in less than a decade.
He said Canada and the Gulf nations are aligned as trading nations and energy superpowers who are going green.
“To the uninitiated, Canada and the UAE can appear as different as snow and sand, yet we’re deeply, deeply aligned,” he told investors.
“The level of penetration usage of artificial intelligence is the highest in the UAE and it’s one of the largest and most sophisticated sets of investors in the world,” Carney told reporters.
Carney said that will be a major focus of a trade mission to the UAE next year, along with energy and agriculture. He said the countries are starting “a new chapter” following his visit, the first by a sitting Canadian prime minister since 1983.
He also told reporters that he raised the Sudan civil war with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whose government denies accusations it is fuelling ethnic violence in that country.
Carney did not specify whether he believes the UAE government or the human-rights groups that accuse it of supporting the Rapid Support Forces militia. But he said the two talked about U.S. President Donald Trump’s attempts at peace in Sudan.
“We did discuss the situation in Sudan,” Carney said, adding that this centred on the so-called Quad process where the U.S., the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are working on “establishing a ceasefire and peace consistent with … the initiative of President Trump.”
Carney’s speech to investors came shortly before he was set to board a flight to Johannesburg for the G20 leaders’ summit.
The Trump administration says it will have no senior American officials present in South Africa, which it accuses of allowing anti-white violence to take place. The South African government says Trump’s views do not reflect crime statistics or reality.
Canada has listed five priorities for the G20 summit: improving critical-mineral supply chains, using AI for sustainable development, preventing wildfires and disasters, reforming global development funding and debt, and advancing gender equality through economic growth.
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