Voyageur 85
It's Canadian Citizenship Week. For the First Time, Americans Are Invited, and Carney Is Calling In the World's Biggest Money. $1 Trillion Is the Target.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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It's Canadian Citizenship Week. For the First Time, Americans Are Invited.
This week is Canada's annual citizenship celebration - and this year, for the first time, millions of Americans are included. Bill C-3, which passed in December, extended citizenship by descent to anyone with a Canadian ancestor, regardless of how many generations ago the Canuck had been hiding in the family tree. That means Americans who've never set foot in Canada may already be citizens.
Quebec's national archives have seen a 3,000% spike in requests for documents needed to prove Canadian ancestry, with the vast majority coming from Americans tracking down birth certificates, baptismal records, and marriage documents from generations past. Processing times for citizenship certificates have doubled.
The stories are sometimes convoluted. One example is that of a retired law firm CEO in New Hampshire who traced her grandparents' roots and realized Canadian citizenship opened seasonal work in New Zealand through Commonwealth mobility programs she hadn't known existed. Her son, a dive instructor in the Philippines, used it as a ticket to a UK working-holiday visa - and a life in London with his British girlfriend.
For Canadians living abroad who've watched friends and family feel increasingly displaced in the U.S., there's some satisfaction about this moment. As Washington debates whether to strip birthright citizenship from children born on American soil, Ottawa is busy mailing out certificates to people who didn't even know they were Canadian.
Read more: CIC News / CIC News
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Carney Is Calling In the World's Biggest Money. $1 Trillion Is the Target.
PM Mark Carney has sent invitations to 100 of the world's largest investment firms - Blackrock, Singapore's GIC sovereign wealth fund, and others - for a Canada Investment Summit in Toronto on September 14 and 15. The pitch is that in a world of tariff wars, blockades, and geopolitical upheaval, Canada remains a stable place to put money to work.
The goal is to unlock $1 trillion in investment over five years. Projects on the table include LNG terminals, pipelines, data centres, ports, and the $80 billion-plus defence build-up. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and PSP are co-hosting, and the CPPIB's chief public affairs officer captured the pitch in a memorable line: "Canada is cool again."
For more than a decade, investment in Canada lagged behind peers - pension funds were putting more money outside the country than inside it. Foreign direct investment hit its highest level since 2007 in 2025, so the trend is changing, but business leaders are not pulling punches when they say that words and memorandums of understanding are not enough. Canada has a habit of announcing big projects and not building them.
The summit is a bet that the country can capitalize on the advantages of “Brand Canada”: energy, resources, a strong financial sector - before the window closes.
Read more: CBC News / Global News