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.
Open early, open late, open to everyone. In a big, cold, spread-out country, the local Tims has quietly become the public living room where Canadians actually gather: retirees at dawn, hockey teams at dusk, and most of the nation in between.
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, a quiet Canadian champion that has become the world's training house for aviation, defence, and medicine.
The Montreal planemaker finished 2025 with its turnaround complete and a record backlog, and its fastest-growing business is now outfitting allied militaries with mission aircraft built on Canadian airframes.
Enbridge moves most of the oil Canada sells to the United States, the continent's busiest energy link, and lately a pioneer of Indigenous ownership and an all-of-the-above energy strategy.
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.