Initial public offerings have been one of the biggest themes in financial markets on both sides of the border so far this year, with Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. completing the largest IPO in history and drugmaker Apotex Health Corp. having the biggest IPO in Canada since 2021. The gap between the two deals, however, is enormous. SpaceX raised US$85.7 billion in June while Apotex raised $1.5 billion. But bankers and lawyers advising Canadian dealmakers are encouraged to see IPOs returning to Canada after a prolonged slowdown between 2022 and 2024. They also hope the enthusiasm generated by the high-profile deals in the U.S. encourages further activity north of the border. “The conversation has been completely dominated by the large IPOs in the United States,” Desmond Lee, a capital markets lawyer at Toronto’s Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP , said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much coverage of a single IPO as I have for the SpaceX IPO. There is hope that some of that enthusiasm will rub off on the Canadian market .” Overall, Canada’s financial sector raised about $376 billion through 586 deals in the first six months of 2026, up 21.5 per cent from the $309.3 billion raised in the first half of 2025, according to Financial Post Data. The strong start puts the sector on track to surpass the $597 billion recorded in 2025, the highest annual total since 2010. Canada’s biggest banks played a key role in bringing in those investments by helping companies raise money for a fee. In the first half of 2026, RBC Capital Markets’ team participated in the most number of deals and helped raise the largest amount of capital, $49 billion, or 13 per cent of all capital raised in Canada. TD Securities Inc. was second with a market share of 9.5 per cent, raising about $35.8 billion, while BMO Capital Markets was third with $35.1 billion. National Bank Financial. , CIBC World Markets Inc and Scotia Capital Inc ., followed at $34 billion, $32.8 billion and $30.7 billion, respectively, giving them corresponding market shares of 9, 8.7 and 8.2 per cent. Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia and Bank of Montreal were among the Big Six banks that worked on the Apotex offering, with the drugmaker pricing its IPO at $24 per share. That offering accounted for 59 per cent of the $2.53 billion raised through IPOs in Canada in the first half of 2026. The other key IPOs include agri-food player AGT Food and Ingredients Inc, which raised about $449.5 million, and miner Lumina Metals Corp., which raised $421.2 billion. In total, those three companies accounted for more than 90 per cent of the money raised through IPOs so far this year. The total amount of money raised in the first six months is already higher than the $1.47 billion raised through 11 deals in all of 2025 and the $1.76 billion raised in total between 2022 to 2024, but the outsized impact of the Apotex deal on the overall numbers suggests the recovery in Canada’s IPO market has yet to broaden across a larger number of issuers. “It’s a very different feel in Canada (compared to the U.S.),” he said. “We don’t have the companies that have announced their intentions to do an IPO in the AI space.” Even though the IPO market hasn’t been as robust as in the U.S., more companies are coming to the market or are contemplating to do so, which has been “great to see,” said Jackie Nixon, who heads the Canadian Equity Capital Markets division at the Royal Bank of Canada. On the whole, businesses have been relying more on equity to raise capital compared to recent years. The amount of capital raised through share sales in the first half of 2026 increased 46.8 per cent to $17.86 billion, compared to $12.16 billion in the first half of 2025. The increase in equity issuance also signals more activity compared to the glut between 2022 and 2024 following the peak of 2021. In 2021, businesses raised $58.1 billion through 861 deals in the equities space, according to FP Data, but it subsequently declined to $20.5 billion in 432 deals in 2022, $19.7 billion in 334 deals in 2023 and $18.4 billion in 300 deals in 2024. Back then, some analysts said the uncertainty in the economy and the poor performances of companies after their IPOs during the pandemic impacted the stock price of issuers , which made them less likely to want to issue shares. Now, thematic tailwinds have been driving performance, Nixon said. For example, the current geopolitical scenario and Prime Minister Mark Carney’s focus on critical minerals and defence has led to more activity in those sectors. Of the 239 deals in the equities space, 154 were related to the materials sector, according to FP Data. These companies raised about $7.8 billion, nearly half the equity total of $17.9 billion. Looking ahead, Nixon said there’s a “growing pipeline of companies across sectors” hoping to come to the market in the second half of the year. Some Canadian companies are also contemplating adding a U.S. listing, she said. MDA Space Ltd did something similar in March this year when the TSX-listed company launched an IPO in the U.S. The total amount of debt raised by corporate companies also increased to $178.9 billion through 171 deals in the first half of 2026 from $151.7 billion raised during the same time last year. Decision-makers in the debt space were a little bit more selective at the start of the year, but there was a pickup in activity in the last few months of the first half of 2026, which stabilized the overall numbers, Peter Wiazowski, a corporate finance lawyer and partner at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, said. “There were some periods where making decisions on opportunistic refinancings led people to go a little slower in order to see how the rate environment settles out,” he said. “We had some months, for example, of almost no new corporate issuance and then over the last couple of months, things have sort of come to a sort of a stability.” Patrick MacDonald, co-head of Canadian debt capital markets at RBC, said issuers accessed the market during windows of stability and investor appetite kept pace. The highlight of the year, he said, has been so-called maple bonds, or money raised in Canada by foreign companies. Amazon.com Inc.’s $14-billion offering and Alphabet Inc.’s $8.5-billion deal rank as the first and second largest corporate bond transactions in Canadian market history, MacDonald said. So far, there has been $35.8-billion worth of maple bonds issued by 15 companies, which is already more than twice the 15.8 billion raised in 2025, he said. Overall, the strong performance of Canadian capital markets has taken place despite the uncertainty related to the trade tensions with the U.S., global geopolitical concerns and a stuttering economy. Opinion: Our capital markets need to start looking for Canadian SpaceXsThese five TSX stocks have made Canadian investors a fortune in the first half of 2026 Jordan Baimel, financial deals services leader at PwC Canada, said companies aren’t waiting for conditions to become perfect. “Companies that need to grow and scale … understand the need to implement the strategic objectives,” he said. “I still think it’s a bit of a tumultuous environment, but deal making could help combat that.” Baimel also said opportunities are created during periods of volatility and that many companies are quite aggressively taking advantage of those situations. “They need to,” he said. “Being on the sidelines only works for so long. You really have to push ahead with your strategy if you want to be successful.” Lee said investors have also become more resilient to geopolitical factors simply because they have to be. “It’s not as though these factors don’t matter. It’s just that they may not be perceived as long-lasting,” he said. “There will still be uncertainty and, ultimately, issuers still need to get on with life and make the investments they need to make and continue to carry on their business.” • Email: nkarim@postmedia.com
High-profile IPOs, equity issues renewing hope for more market activity in Canada
