‘We are energy superpower’: Mark Carney pitches Canada as natural resources powerhouse; steering trade away from US?

Canadian PM Mark Carney on Sunday projected Canada as a reliable trading partner, as a part of his efforts to steer away trade from the US, which is becoming more protectionist and unpredictable.

Speaking at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit, which brings together 11 countries, Carney said as a consequence of President Donald Trump’s high protectionist tariffs, countries might end up trading with each other more and less with the US.

During the ASEAN Business and Investment Summit, he also highlighted the scale of Canada’s natural resources and its efforts to speed up exports.


“We’re an energy superpower – an unabashed energy superpower,” he told business leaders. “We have the third-largest reserves of oil. We have the fourth-largest reserves of LNG. We’ve just started our first LNG shipments,” as cited by The Globe and Mail.

He urged Asian governments not to enter trade arrangements that restrict their options or limit their ability to work with other international partners.

“What you should try to avoid doing, though, is tying your hands about what you can do with other jurisdictions, because there are a lot more countries, by GDP, that are willing and keen to continue to have relatively open trade, certainly to respect rules-based trade,” he said.

Alongside oil and gas, Carney said Canada has begun the process of developing a revenue-generating small modular nuclear reactor. He added that Canada has one of the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals and is the “largest centre of mining finance in the world.”

The leader also stressed that international partners will find strong demand in Canada’s own market. He said the government has committed to spending tens of billions more on the military, describing it as a “quadrupling of our defence spending” by the end of the decade. This includes investment in cybertechnology and artificial intelligence, according to the Globe and Mail.

He also called for stronger links between existing trade blocs, saying the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership should be connected with the European Union. He described both pacts as having “complementary approaches to trade,” adding that he sees the possibility of “bringing those closer together, having, at a minimum, a docking between the two blocks or broader arrangements that are there, and that’s how you start to rebuild a broader global trading system.”

His remarks come as countries begin forming new alliances to maintain open trade. The Financial Times reported last week that several World Trade Organization members, including Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, are creating a new group called the Future of Investment and Trade Partnership, or “FIT-P,” to support trade openness.

The partnership is expected to include around 10 countries, with New Zealand joining Singapore and the UAE as core founding members. Other possible members include Morocco, Rwanda, Malaysia, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Norway.