At 4.45am on Monday, three buses glided through the deserted streets of Toronto, reaching the low-lying farmland of Ontario as the sun began to rise. On to the lawn of the Irish embassy in the leafy Ottawa suburb of Rockville, the coaches decanted their passengers some five hours and 450km (279.6 miles) later.There, the group – comprising the 150 Irish business leaders that were in Canada last week as part of the annual EY Entrepreneur of the Year (EoY) CEO retreat – met Canadian prime minister Mark Carney. As his warm-up act, the former governor of the Bank of England had Irish ambassador to Canada John Concannon, who had opened up his home for the occasion. Although the session was held behind closed doors, its context was very clear.“There’s a lot happening,” Goldy Hyder, president and chief executive of the Business Council of Canada, told the group, comprising this year’s finalists and alumni of the programme. That was putting it mildly. In the new era of US economic incoherence, Canada is experiencing something between a traumatic break-up with its largest trading partner and an awakening. Carney told the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that what is happening under the second Trump administration should be viewed as a “rupture” of the international order, rather than a transition. That was even before the US-Israeli coalition launched its war in Iran, sending oil prices soaring. If it wasn’t already, the former central banker’s clarion call for the world’s “middle powers” to come together and act as a counterweight to the heavyweights vying for global hegemony sounds credible, with the world economy now staring down the barrel of an oil crisis.With all that in mind, Carney has been frantically jetting about the globe, pursuing free trade deals as he seeks to wean Canada off its reliance on the US. The one-time Goldman Sachs banker, whose grandparents hailed from Westport, Co Mayo, sees Ireland as not just a bridge to Europe but also a potential broker in future agreements that could benefit Canada. Crucially, Carney was advertising the fact that Canada was open for business. Among the EoY group, he will find plenty of Irish companies that are actively exploring the market.[ Irish entrepreneurs travel to Toronto for week of executive educationOpens in new window ]“The doors are open” was the message that Laura McCarthy, founder and chief executive of Drink Botanicals Ireland, which provides garnishes, syrups and dried fruits to global food and drink businesses, took from the meeting. “They’re willing to take on businesses from the EU and support them,” she said. Commander Chris Hadfield chatting to part of a 150 strong delegation including more than 120 of Ireland’s leading entrepreneurs. Photograph: Naoise Culhane McCarthy is one of the finalists in the emerging category of this year’s EoY awards. She says her company entered the Canadian market last year through Amazon, partially as a way of hedging against the impact of US tariffs on European goods. “It’s a nice way to test the market, and then maybe go down the distribution route, or in terms of getting a wholesaler or a distributor in Canada,” McCarthy says. In 2026, Drink Botanicals’ Canadian sales were up by more than 200 per cent year-on-year, she says. Another emerging finalist, Jennifer ‘the Skin Nerd’ Rock, is at an earlier stage in the process. “We’ve started exploring it,” the founder of the Skingredients product line says of the Canadian market. “I started working with Enterprise Ireland last year, trying to understand and map out our export plan, and Canada was one of the [main markets we identified].” The past week only heightened her interest in the country. “It needs to be at the top of my priority list,” she says. [ Shortlist for 2026 EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards revealedOpens in new window ]“The skincare market specifically is worth about CAD$14.9 billion (€9.32 billion) in Canada, and if you look at Ireland, it’s about €1 billion. So for me, there’s just a huge opportunity here. Obviously, we know about the kind of relationships that are forming between Ireland and Canada and how it’s going to be an easier place to work with.”Executive education is also a key element of the retreat. Over the course of the week, the group heard from a coterie of high-powered speakers on leadership and strategy, including Hall of Fame Canadian ice hockey player Hayley Wickenheiser and astronaut Chris Hadfield. Roger Wallace, EY Ireland head of assurance & partner lead, EY Entrepreneur of the Year; Frank O’Keeffe, EY Ireland managing partner ; meeting prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney. Photograph: Naoise Culhane “If you want to change the world, the thing you’ve got to change the most is yourself,” says the retired Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot. He tells the group that he has just arrived back in Toronto from Ireland, where he visited his daughter and granddaughter and played a session with musicians in the Cobblestone pub in Dublin’s Smithfield. “If there’s one unifying characteristic of astronauts,” he says, “it is a perpetual dissatisfaction with your current level of competence; an absolute driving need to get better at stuff, because the world’s not gonna wait for you.” His message landed with the group. “I just absolutely loved his whole sentiment around intentionality and purpose,” says Clare Walsh, who cofounded Armagh-based homewear brand Kukoon with her brother Paul Vallely, with whom she is a finalist in the established category. “What are you going to do next? Why are you doing it? If he’s asking himself those questions, [you should] definitely sit back and ask, what are we doing next? What is the plan?”Overall, Walsh, who is also 29 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, says the sense of positivity from the speakers and other attendees has deeply affected her. “I don’t know if that’s coming out of Canada in general at the moment. They’re all singing off the same hymn sheet,” she says. “But considering coming here, I felt a bit like the world’s all doom and gloom, and the speakers are all talking about being through these times before. We always come back. We always come out of it. It really renewed my sense of hope.”EY Ireland managing partner Frank O’Keeffe says the trip was designed to take the entrepreneurs “out of their environment for a few days”.“The executive education, purposely, is all around artificial intelligence, strategy and leadership. It’s like putting 150 Irish entrepreneurs into a classroom with exercises to do.” The retreat isn’t all hard-nosed market reconnaissance and high-level strategy, however. Giving the entrepreneurs a sample of the Canadian way of doing business is only a small part of what Roger Wallace, EY head of assurance and partner lead for the programme, and his team wanted to achieve. Sampling Canadian life, culture, and heritage was another element, with excursions to Niagara Falls and the Art Gallery of Ontario forming part of the agenda.[ WaterWipes founder Edward McCloskey chosen as EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2025Opens in new window ]On Tuesday night, the group attended Rogers Stadium for a baseball game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Tampa Bay Marlins. Padraic O’Kane, director and co-founder of the now annual Aer Lingus College Football Classic, has plenty of experience with US and Canadian sports events. In a question-and-answer session with Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins, he puckishly asked whether either franchise or Major League Baseball had thought about bringing a game to Europe, specifically Ireland. “Seemingly they’d like to bring it abroad,” O’Kane says. “So we’ll have to follow that up a bit. I said I’m going to reach out to him, and you never know. We could have a baseball exhibition game in Ireland before too long.”