I walked up to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s chief of staff, Marc-André Blanchard, on the sidewalk outside the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto. “Was it a good day?” I asked. “It was a great day for Canada,” he replied. I’m not so sure.

Inside, Blanchard’s boss was wrapping up the Canada Investment Summit, saying farewell to the Wall Street billionaires and Gulf royals who came to buy up Canada’s infrastructure and natural resources.

Whisked past us in armoured black SUVs, through streets lined with hundreds of police, the global money managers made their way back to helicopters and private jets. What did ordinary Canadians get out of the meeting?

The big announcement at the summit was $50 billion to build a monstrous AI data centre in a lentil field outside Regina. The Finance Minister also unveiled a plan to privatize Canada’s airports. And the government announced a huge new corporate tax cut.

This week, Ksi Lisims LNG heralded a tentative supply deal with Australian gas major Santos. And the CEO of the Canada Infrastructure Bank confirmed the Crown corp is ready to lend billions of public dollars to First Nations to buy into the American-owned project.

That’s good news for Blackstone, Apollo Global Management and Stonepeak, the U.S. private equity firms that have been waiting for an injection of taxpayer cash to start construction on the floating terminal over in Korea.

Ksi Lisims was featured in a leaked project catalogue for the investment summit. It’s clearly become a pet project for Mark Carney. And as we’re learning, he’ll move heaven and earth for his friends on Wall Street.

But as Indigenous leaders reminded Carney from outside the police barricades, there are pockets of the country where the American gas industry, and AI data centres, face real resistance.

As popular as Carney is right now, bulldozing local communities for Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s billionaire friends could spark a political backlash. 

And looming over all of this is the reality that both LNG and AI data centres are overhyped financial bubbles that could collapse based on factors outside of even Mark Carney’s control.

Inside the billionaires’ Bay Street fortress, watched over by drones and sniper teams, the champagne was flowing and our banker PM was grinning from ear to ear. We’ll see how long the party lasts.