The companies and institutions through which Canada acts abroad — pipelines and pension funds, planemakers and potash miners. Each profile reads the business as a foreign-policy actor: what it does, where its leverage lies, and the choices it can no longer avoid.
Politicians reach for Tim Hortons when they want to sound like the country. Its coffee, pricing and global strategy are decided by a company headquartered in Miami — and the irony is getting harder to ignore.
Nutrien mines the mineral that grows the world's food. A war 8,000 kilometres away turned its Saskatchewan reserves from a commodity into something closer to leverage.
It moved $378 billion in goods last year and let a weaver in Ghana sell straight to a customer in Berlin. It is also a Canadian champion the country has never learned to claim.
CAE builds the simulators where pilots learn before they ever touch a real cockpit. Whose pilots it trains, and under what terms, is a foreign-policy question hiding inside a training contract.
The Montreal planemaker finished 2025 with a completed turnaround and a record backlog. The engine of its next five years is a business built on selling private jets to militaries.
Enbridge moves most of the oil Canada sells to the United States. That makes it the physical form of Canada's deepest dependency — and, lately, a test case for who gets to own the country's energy future.
A publicly owned utility firm from Winnipeg advises power grids in more than a hundred countries. It was shut down in 2021, quietly restarted in 2024, and fills a niche almost no one else can.