A signboard displays the TSX close in Toronto.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
In the world of public markets, Canada is increasingly becoming a stepping stone for companies eyeing more lucrative opportunities abroad.
This week, Barrick Mining Corp. became the latest Canadian business to spurn the Toronto Stock Exchange in favour of New York for its coming North American spinoff. Having a primary listing in the United States and only a secondary listing in Canada increases the likelihood of Barrick accessing major American indexes such as the S&P 500, which would expose the company to a broader swath of large, institutional investors.
But Barrick is far from the first to treat its TSX listing as a layover stop on a flight path to faster growth and it will not be the last.
As Canadian capital markets are gradually relegated to second-class status, experts warn the country faces a mounting economic fallout. Barrick’s decision is part of a pattern Laura Paglia has been watching unfold for years.
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“What you see in the move from Barrick is it is eroding Canada or Toronto’s pull as the global hub,” said Ms. Paglia, chief executive officer of the Toronto-based think tank Canadian Forum for Financial Markets.
“If the TSX is not the anchor listing, the ecosystem will go with it, and that is where the investment banking is going to flow, that is where the specialized financial systems are going to flow and it is where the jobs are going to flow.”
Last month, Toronto’s Xanadu Quantum Technologies Ltd. went public on the Nasdaq. The company is also listed on the TSX, though its primary listing is in New York and the vast majority of its shares trade on that exchange.
Days before Xanadu’s market debut, crypto finance company Galaxy Digital Inc. delisted from the TSX in order to trade solely on the Nasdaq. Despite having gone public on the TSX Venture Exchange in 2018, graduating to the TSX in 2020 and only listing on the Nasdaq in May, 2025, nearly 10 times as many Galaxy shares were trading south of the border than in Canada by the time the company abandoned its TSX listing.
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Russel Drew, Canada CEO of global law firm DLA Piper, said it’s a common path.
“Given the Canadian market, if you’re trading on the TSX, a lot of those companies will ask how quickly can I get to Nasdaq or how quickly can I get to NYSE? I want the liquidity, I want the added capital,” Mr. Drew said in a recent interview. “There is a natural desire to go.”
That desire extends beyond simply switching listing venues. In January, waste disposal company GFL Environmental Inc. announced plans to move its head office from outside of Toronto to Miami Beach in hopes of winning a greater following from U.S. index funds.
Oakville, Ont.-based Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp. is actively evaluating a full corporate redomicile to the U.S. Bank of Nova Scotia analyst Robert Hope said in a note to clients on Tuesday that would be “highly positive” from an index perspective.
“Although Canadian index deletions would occur, US index ownership is structurally larger, meaning that US passive inflows would more than offset Canadian selling over time,” Mr. Hope wrote. “The timing may be uneven, with near‑term weakness possible as deletions precede additions, but the longer‑term effect is a structural improvement in demand for AQN shares.”
Rob Peterman, chief commercial officer of the TSX at exchange parent TMX Group Ltd., said the company has “always been positive about the value of dual listings for companies in terms of accessing capital and accessing liquidity.”
“We don’t have this concept of a primary listing,” Mr. Peterman said. “It is not, for us you’re either listed with TSX or you’re not. Barrick is interlisted with New York and we don’t treat them any differently or call them a primary listing or something like that. That concept is not something we have in Canada.”
As of March 31, TMX data showed 202 interlisted companies on the TSX, including 167 interlisted with U.S. exchanges.
Access to Canada’s main stock market benchmarks, the S&P/TSX Composite Index and the blue-chip S&P/TSX 60, has long been among the key reasons for companies to maintain a primary Canadian listing. Companies that move their primary listing elsewhere typically have to leave those indexes, but S&P has recently proposed a rule change to allow companies to keep their index membership even after they decamp to a different country’s exchange.
If adopted, the move would lessen the impact of companies leaving Canadian exchanges on the country’s capital markets ecosystem.
Those risks are already coming to fruition, Ms. Paglia said, noting Canada’s share of total mining company financing activity was 46 per cent in 2024, down from more than 60 per cent, where it had been for several years previously.
“We are losing market share,” Ms. Paglia said.
The TSX’s Mr. Peterman acknowledged that “the investor base in Canada around mining is changing, but people are still coming here to access global investors and global capital in the market.”
He pointed to copper and silver producer Lumina Metals Corp. as an example. The company raised more than $400-million in an initial public offering on the TSX earlier this week and Mr. Peterman said its shares will start trading shortly.
“In general we see the Canadian markets growing and Canadian companies getting bigger and bigger and more important on a global stage,” he said.
Mining is by far the largest sector in Canadian public markets, with the industry’s total market capitalization having recently surpassed $1-trillion. For companies in smaller sectors, however, the TSX is rarely top of mind.
Brian Bloom, CEO of Bloom Burton & Co., a Toronto-based investment bank that works in the health care sector, said biotech companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital never IPO on the TSX.
The S&P/TSX Composite Index screen at the TMX Market Centre in downtown Toronto in 2022.Tijana Martin/The Canadian Press
“The TSX is a stepping stone, junior exchange for companies who choose to, instead of raising venture capital, tap the public markets for the equivalent.”
If Canadian companies eventually choose to move their main listing abroad, or even bypass the domestic market altogether, Mr. Bloom said that is not necessarily a problem.
“Why would it matter where we are listed? Redomiciling is obviously a negative trend, but Canadian companies can attract global capital on global exchanges and global talent and where they are listed makes no difference,” he said.
The continuing exodus of Canadian corporate listings is being compounded by a recent spike in privatizations as the number of domestic businesses being bought primarily by U.S. private equity investors has soared in recent years. Taken together, the two trends are symptomatic of the decline in the number of operating companies on the TSX that has been continuing for decades.
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Mr. Peterman said the drop is largely owing to merger and acquisition activity and TMX data confirm the vast majority of delistings from the TSX are the result of M&A deals. The total number of listings on the TSX and TSX-V are actually rising every year, though the main driver of that growth is the launch of new exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.
That trend could be problematic, said Dan Wilson, chair in business law and regulation at the University of Calgary’s faculty of law.
“The proliferation of TSX ETFs, corresponding with a significant decline in TSX operating companies, raises concerns about market distortions arising from an increasingly large pool of passive capital chasing the same declining number of operating company investments,” Prof. Wilson wrote in a 2025 research paper.
“Such conditions lead to obvious concentration risks and over-valuation of public stocks.”
While most Canadians are likely, for the most part, unaware of the country’s shrinking public markets, Prof. Wilson wrote the consequences will eventually become too large to ignore.
The fact that the costs are not well understood doesn’t diminish the inherent risks, he wrote. “Operating public company decline is soon to become a major macroeconomic issue.”