The United Arab Emirates is ready to invest as much as $50 billion in Canada’s industries, notably energy and artificial intelligence, following a visit by Prime Minister Mark Carney in Abu Dhabi.
Reuters reported the news, citing a statement by the Emirati authorities that did not feature any details on the investment agreement. Earlier reports, however, mentioned an investment pact signed by Carney and his hosts in Abu Dhabi.
The pact was “a prelude to a trade agreement in any scenario that Canada has been in,” the former premier of Quebec, Jean Charest, who accompanies Carney on his UAE visit, told the media.
Canadian media noted that the UAE is using its abundant oil and gas resources to fuel a data center boom, benefiting from cheap energy, and that Carney’s government wanted to replicate the scheme with Alberta’s oil sands as a source of affordable energy to power data centers.
Canada’s new Prime Minister has been touring the world in search for alternative trade partners to the country as it distances itself from its neighbor in the south amid President Trump’s non-delicate, to put it mildly, rhetoric on matters of trade and Canadian sovereignty.
“The only way Canada is going to have trade agreements with … new regions in the world is if the prime minister is the one who leads it,” Charest also said, as quoted by CBC News, adding that “We have a lot in common, because we’re each in our own way a hub to the rest of the world.”
Following Carney’s meeting with UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, an official statement from the Prime Minister’s office said that the two had agreed to close a deal that would see lower bilateral tariffs and greater export market access for Canadian companies. Canada plans to double the amount of non-food goods it exports to countries other than the United States over the next 10 years.
