Ottawa hands its foreign investment agency to a Rio Tinto chair and a private capital veteran as it chases $1 trillion in investment over five years.
Ottawa has rewritten the Invest in Canada leadership table at the top of its foreign investment agency, with Prime Minister Mark Carney announcing on August 31, 2026 that Dominic Barton will serve as Chair of the Board of Directors and Gurinder Grewal will take over as Chief Executive Officer. The two appointments land as the federal government pushes an explicit target of catalysing $1 trillion in total investment in Canada over the next five years.
Barton, currently chair of mining giant Rio Tinto and a former Canadian ambassador to China, takes the chair role on a part-time basis for a three-year term. Grewal, founder of MEM Growth Partners, takes the CEO position full time for five years. Outgoing chair Karl Tabbakh, whose three-year term has expired, has agreed to stay on the board to smooth the handover.
Dominic Barton Arrives From Rio Tinto and a 30-Year McKinsey Career
Barton’s résumé straddles the two worlds Invest in Canada is trying to connect: global capital and Canadian public policy. He spent more than three decades at McKinsey & Company, including nine years as its Global Managing Partner, and currently chairs both Rio Tinto and LeapFrog Investments.
His federal experience is equally relevant to the file. Barton chaired Canada’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, the body that produced a series of influential recommendations on productivity, infrastructure financing and investment attraction. He then served as Canada’s Ambassador to China from 2019 to 2021, a posting that spanned one of the most strained periods in the bilateral relationship.
Gurinder Grewal’s Energy, Industrials and Infrastructure Deal Record
Grewal comes to the CEO job from the deal side of the table rather than the public sector. He is Founder and Managing Partner of MEM Growth Partners, and previously spent more than a decade at Advent International, where he was a Partner and Co-Head of Industrials, Infrastructure and Energy.
That background maps closely onto the sectors the government says it wants the agency focused on: energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and infrastructure. For foreign institutional investors used to dealing with private equity counterparties, the appointment puts someone with a familiar vocabulary at the front door of Canada’s investment promotion agency.
Terms of the Two Invest in Canada Appointments
| Appointee | Position | Basis | Term |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dominic Barton | Chair, Board of Directors | Part-time | Three years |
| Gurinder Grewal | Chief Executive Officer | Full-time | Five years |
| Karl Tabbakh | Director (outgoing Chair) | Not specified | Remaining on board beyond term expiry |
The staggered structure is worth noting for governance watchers: a five-year executive mandate sitting alongside a three-year chair term, with the previous chair retained as a director. The stated purpose of Tabbakh’s extension is continuity, support for the leadership transition, and oversight of what the government calls the next phase of the organisation’s journey.
Why Karl Tabbakh’s Tenure Matters to the Handover
Carney publicly thanked Tabbakh for steering the agency through what the announcement described as a period of significant global disruption. During that stretch, Invest in Canada expanded its collaboration with provincial, territorial, Indigenous and municipal partners and broadened its support for global investors looking to establish or grow operations in the country.
The government also used the announcement to point to a comparative statistic: in 2025, Canada recorded the highest foreign direct investment inflows per capita in the G7 and the second-highest FDI outflows per capita. Keeping the outgoing chair on the board is a signal that Ottawa does not intend a reset of the agency’s investor relationships, only an escalation of its ambition.
The FDI Numbers Behind the $1-Trillion Investment Target
The appointments are anchored in a set of figures the federal government is now citing regularly to make its case to global capital.
- Stock of FDI in Canada: $1.6 trillion at the end of 2025, a 6.9% increase over the prior year.
- FDI inflows: $96.8 billion in 2025 — the highest annual level since 2007.
- Public capital commitment: roughly $280 billion in capital investments and incentives in support of third parties over five years.
- Leverage expected: more than $1 trillion in total investment from public, private and institutional partners.
- Infrastructure ranking: in May 2026, Canada was ranked the world’s most attractive market for infrastructure investment by the Global Infrastructure Investor Association.
- Market access: 16 free trade agreements across 51 countries, covering 1.5 billion consumers and about two thirds of global GDP.
The government’s framing is that FDI in Canada is at its highest level in two decades and running at twice the rate of its nearest G7 competitor. The implicit task handed to Barton and Grewal is to convert that momentum into signed, financed and constructed projects rather than expressions of interest.
A Mandate Built Around Energy, Critical Minerals and AI
The announcement was unusually specific about where the new leadership is expected to concentrate. Invest in Canada is being directed to catalyse billions of dollars of new investment in Canadian energy, critical minerals, artificial intelligence and infrastructure — the same four baskets that have dominated federal economic messaging through 2026.
That direction sits alongside other recent federal moves aimed at shortening the distance between investor interest and construction, including Ottawa’s decision to trim the Impact Assessment Act project list. The agency’s mandate language — guiding investors “from initial interest to shovels in the ground” — reads as an acknowledgement that permitting and execution, not marketing, are the binding constraints.
Invest in Canada’s New Reporting Line and the Major Projects Office
Invest in Canada is the country’s FDI attraction and promotion agency, established under the Invest in Canada Act, which came into force in 2018. It has recently been moved under the responsibility of Dominic LeBlanc, President of the King’s Privy Council for Canada and the minister responsible for Canada-U.S. Trade, Intergovernmental Affairs, Internal Trade and One Canadian Economy.
The stated reason for the shift is closer alignment with the government’s broader economic build-out and tighter coordination with other federal bodies, most notably Canada’s Major Projects Office. In practice, that places investment attraction in the same portfolio as Canada-U.S. trade management — a structural choice that reflects how much of the current agenda is about reducing dependence on a single trading partner.
Trade friction has been a persistent theme in the federal economic file this year, from tariff exposure at manufacturers such as Bombardier facing escalating threats to its U.S. sales to the policy sequencing discussed at the cabinet planning forum in Banff that shaped Carney’s fall agenda.
What Carney and LeBlanc Said About the Appointments
Carney tied the appointments directly to Canada’s resource and workforce pitch, describing the country as an energy superpower with what he called the most educated workforce in the world and rock-solid fiscal strength. He said Barton and Grewal bring “the experience and ambition Canada needs” and that under their leadership the agency will catalyse billions in new investment.
LeBlanc struck a similar note, pointing to critical minerals, clean and conventional energy, and the skilled workforce needed to build major projects at scale. He said the two appointees would build on what he described as Invest in Canada’s strong foundation and attract global capital to the projects that will define the country’s economic future.
The Governance Question Investors Will Watch
For readers following Canadian corporate governance, the more interesting dimension is the profile of the appointees rather than the mandate language. Putting a sitting chair of a global mining company at the head of the board of the agency courting mining and critical minerals capital creates an obvious need for clear conflict-of-interest management, which the announcement did not address in detail. Recusal arrangements, if any, were not specified.
Equally, the pairing of a part-time chair with a full-time chief executive drawn from private markets sets up a test of whether a federal Crown agency can operate at deal speed. The five-year CEO term gives Grewal a runway that extends beyond the government’s current five-year investment horizon — enough time to be measured on outcomes rather than announcements.
No effective start dates for either appointment were disclosed in the announcement, and biographical notes for both appointees were published alongside it.
