Canada Pitches Four Space Projects to Global Investors as Telesat Seeks Partners

Toronto’s Canada Investment Summit brought global capital to the table in September, with more than 100 institutional investors managing more than $100 trillion in assets attending Prime Minister Mark Carney’s event.

Space was part of the pitch, even if it did not receive its own lane in the government’s prospectus. The result was a revealing snapshot of a sector trying to make its case alongside the more familiar calls for investment in energy, transportation, digital infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.

Space projects tucked into prospectus

According to europesays.com, the federal investment prospectus listed 167 individual projects across eight sector chapters, none dedicated to space.

Yet four Canadian space-sector projects appeared in the document. Europesays.com reported that three were placed in the advanced-manufacturing chapter, while a fourth was included under power and utilities.

That placement matters. It presents space not as a separate investment category, but as part of Canada’s broader industrial, communications and infrastructure ambitions.

At the summit’s welcome reception, Carney told attendees: “We have what the world wants. The energy, the resources, the talent, the technology, the capital.”

Telesat seeks strategic partners

Telesat’s Lightspeed constellation was among the space-related opportunities presented to investors. The company says its $7-billion low-Earth-orbit network is fully funded, while it seeks a minority equity stake from investors.

Telesat expects global coverage in early 2028 and is positioning Lightspeed as an alternative to Starlink for defence, aviation, maritime and telecommunications customers.

For Daniel Goldberg, Telesat’s president and CEO, the appeal of a strategic investor extends beyond a cheque.

“Some of these funds own airlines; they own mobile network operators,” Goldberg said in an interview with BNN Bloomberg. “They bring capital, but they also bring the strategic benefits as well.”

He described the summit as an efficient way to speak with major funds and their senior executives, saying there was “a lot of interest in what we’re building.”

Telesat is looking to build a global network, and Goldberg said foreign investment can offer a practical form of validation as the company looks beyond Canada. More sources of capital, he added, should mean more competition to invest and a lower cost of capital for Canadian borrowers.

An economy growing above Earth

The investment case is unfolding against a rapidly expanding global space economy. A SpaceQ analysis describing an OECD report said the sector approached US$600 billion in 2025.

That growth comes with a more crowded orbital environment. According to the same OECD-based analysis, private operators, mostly SpaceX, accounted for 88 per cent of satellites launched in 2025. The analysis said the increase is contributing to heightened space-debris risk.

“Our transport systems, energy grids, communications and food supply all depend on the commercial space economy,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said in a press release cited by SpaceQ.

For Canada, the OECD-based analysis said the country’s civilian institutional space budget reached US$973.8 million in 2025. It also said Canada’s space sector contributed a record $3.8 billion to the national economy in 2024, while business research-and-development expenditures rose 48 per cent.

Mapping a wider investment push

The summit also served as a stage for a larger national investment agenda. PwC Canada launched an interactive resource, Advancing Canada’s Major Projects, which maps major Canadian projects and identifies where investment is flowing and momentum is building.

PwC Canada said the federal government had positioned roughly $280 billion in public capital and incentives to help unlock $1 trillion in total investment across sectors including energy, critical minerals, transportation, digital infrastructure and defence.

“The harder task now is turning that momentum into commitments, and commitments into projects that get built,” Neil Manji, PwC Canada’s infrastructure, engineering and construction leader, said in a statement.

For space companies, the summit offered a place in that larger conversation. The prospectus may not have given the sector its own chapter, but its four entries placed Canadian space projects before some of the world’s biggest pools of capital.

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