Prime Minister Mark Carney attends a news conference in Banff, Alta., on Thursday.Todd Korol/Reuters
Prime Minister Mark Carney is hosting a fundraiser for the Liberal Party on the eve of a marquee summit where he’ll be courting billions of dollars in investment for Canada.
The invite-only fundraising event will take place in Toronto on Sunday night. Beginning on Monday evening, hundreds of senior executives from around the world are gathering in the city at Mr. Carney’s invitation for the Canada Investment Summit, an attempt to get billions in new capital flowing into the country.
The Globe and Mail obtained a copy of the invitation to the fundraiser, billed as “An Evening with Mark Carney.”
The get-together is described as a “unique in-person event as we look at the next steps in our Liberal government’s work to build a better and stronger Canada.”
The location is only provided to those who register and tickets are $1,775 – the maximum annual donation to a political party allowed under election law.
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It’s the latest closed-door fundraiser headlined by the Prime Minister since he became Liberal Leader last year and began rolling back the measures instituted by his predecessor to make political fundraising more transparent.
Mr. Carney held a fundraiser last fall on the sidelines of a Liberal caucus meeting in Edmonton and barred media from attending; under former-prime minister Justin Trudeau, reporters were routinely allowed into fundraisers for the prime minister’s opening remarks.
After the Edmonton event, the Liberal Party said it would instead adopt a case-by-case approach to opening up events to the media.
Then earlier this year, the Liberals introduced legislation that removed the requirement for political parties to proactively publish notice of fundraisers with ticket prices of over $200, as well as report where the event was being held.
Those requirements were put in place after reporting by The Globe in 2016 about wealthy business leaders using fundraisers to effectively buy and sell access to the prime minister and other cabinet ministers to sway government decisions.
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NDP Leader Avi Lewis criticized the timing and secrecy surrounding Mr. Carney’s Sunday event.
“Are any of the donors enjoying access to the Prime Minister at this fundraiser the same executives bidding on Canada’s resources and infrastructure at the investment summit?” he said in a written statement to The Globe.
“We don’t know and it’s harder than ever to find out, thanks to rule changes for fundraisers the Liberals made (and we opposed).”
The changes to the notifications for fundraisers and related details were billed by the government as a privacy measure and an effort to protect those who host or attend events from protests or threats.
Now, parties must notify Elections Canada within 30 days of a fundraiser taking place. A report on the event will still be made public after the fact, including the list of who attended, but the address of the event will be redacted from the report posted online.
The Globe asked the Liberal Party if it would disclose who was invited to Sunday’s event for transparency, but it did not.
“As with all of our fundraising events, local Liberal teams work hard to engage supporters in their communities, and the full list of attendees is made publicly available on the Elections Canada website after the events, in accordance with our reporting requirements,” party spokesperson Maggie Morris said in an e-mail.
Since the new fundraising disclosure rules came into effect on June 18, the Liberals have so far reported holding 13 fundraising events, with Mr. Carney in attendance at one of them – a top-donor event on the margins of the Calgary Stampede in July that also featured cabinet ministers.
The regulated fundraising events registry maintained by Elections Canada shows April, 2026, as the last time the Conservatives held a fundraising event.
The Conservative Party did not return a request for comment from The Globe as to whether it has held any fundraisers since April, or if there were events it has not yet reported publicly.
