At this week’s Investment Summit in Toronto, Canada is pitching itself to the world as a stable, investable economy with the resources, talent, and major projects global capital is looking for.
Over the past year, the federal government has moved quickly to advance major resource and infrastructure projects, including conventional energy and critical minerals. At the Summit this week, that investment push is being backed by significant commitments including $100 billion in new capital to Canadian assets, $325 billion committed by Canada’s banks to infrastructure and businesses, and major new commitments from Canada’s pension funds to invest here.
The opportunity now is to ensure that the capital Canada is mobilizing also builds the capabilities that will create economic value and resilience for decades to come.
Attracting investment can’t be only about financing the projects already in front of us. It also requires deciding which capabilities will create the greatest economic value and resilience for Canada ten and twenty years from now.
Canada’s battery and battery-materials ecosystem belongs near the top of that list.
Canada already has many of the ingredients: significant deposits of lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt, and phosphate; abundant electricity; an established automotive and advanced-manufacturing base; and growing capabilities in battery materials, components, recycling and next-generation technologies.
The opportunity is not simply to mine and export more. It is to capture more of the value between the mine and the finished product through processing, manufacturing, innovation and Canadian intellectual property.
What makes the battery ecosystem strategically different is its multiplier effect across the economy. Batteries are both an enabling technology for other industries and a high-value advanced-manufacturing sector in their own right.
Battery technologies support passenger and commercial vehicles, heavy-duty transportation and micromobility. They support electricity-grid management, backup power and storage for critical municipal infrastructure. They are increasingly needed for data centres and high-performance computing, as well as drones, defence applications and other emerging technologies.
The push to expand production of critical minerals, including nickel, lithium, phosphate, manganese and cobalt, is driven in large part by global demand for batteries.
Yet much of the processing capacity for critical battery materials remains concentrated outside Canada, particularly in China. That leaves Canada and its allies exposed to supply disruptions, export controls and geopolitical leverage. At the same time, trade uncertainty with the United States has reinforced the risks of relying too heavily on any single market.
A stronger Canadian battery ecosystem cannot eliminate those risks. But it can give Canada more options and make us a more valuable partner to allied economies seeking the same resilience.
That strategic value is one reason batteries merit particular attention as Canada sets its investment priorities. Look across the opportunities being discussed in Toronto this week and batteries connect an extraordinary number of the industries Canada is already trying to grow.
That is what makes batteries more than a single investment opportunity. They are enabling infrastructure for several of the industries Canada wants to build next.
Recognizing that strategic role does not mean Canada needs to create a completely self-contained mine-to-cell supply chain. The objective should be to identify where Canada has a genuine competitive advantage, build strategic capacity where it matters, partner with trusted markets where it makes sense and ensure that more of the value created from Canadian resources stays in Canada.
That means investing in homegrown companies and talent while attracting the global capital, expertise and partnerships needed to scale. It means connecting mineral production to processing, manufacturing and innovation, rather than treating each as a separate economic opportunity.
And it means thinking beyond this week’s investment decisions to the industries those investments can help create tomorrow.
Batteries will be embedded across much of the economy Canada is building for the next 20 years, from transportation and electricity to computing, infrastructure and defence.
The more Canadian minerals, technology, intellectual property and manufacturing that go into those batteries, the better positioned Canada will be to build an economy that is more productive, more investable and more resilient to whatever shocks come next.