Bill C-39 makes considerably more sense when viewed alongside Carney’s wider economic program.
The Trump administration’s escalating trade war has thrown Canada’s economic model into crisis. For decades, Canadian governments pursued ever-deeper integration with the United States. Carney’s response to the breakdown of that relationship has been to promise that Canada can reinvent itself as a destination for global investment while rapidly expanding energy, mining, transportation, defense, and artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Central to that project is the government’s Major Projects Office, established in 2025 to accelerate what Ottawa calls “nation-building” projects. Bill C-39 extends this agenda by seeking a “one project, one review, one year” standard for federal approvals. The government argues that faster decisions can coexist with environmental protections and indigenous rights.
Critics, however, have questioned whether compressing approval processes can preserve meaningful democratic participation.
Environmental reviews, indigenous consultations, regulatory hearings, and collective bargaining all take time. Strikes can halt ports, railways, airlines, and other infrastructure through which commodities and capital circulate. For a government promising investors “speed, certainty, and predictability,” these democratic and collective processes are obstacles.
Carney made the government’s priorities remarkably explicit at this month’s Canada Investment Summit in Toronto. The event brought together investors from nearly thirty countries managing more than $100 trillion in assets. Ottawa says the summit produced commitments approaching $500 billion and is part of a strategy to catalyze $1 trillion in investment over five years.
Carney told investors that his government was pursuing some of Canada’s most significant regulatory reforms in generations and promised that “when Canada says it wants something built, Canada will get it built.” He also announced a major expansion of business investment deductions that the government says will reduce Canada’s marginal effective tax rate on new investment from roughly 13 percent to 6.4 percent.
And then there is privatization.
At the same summit, Carney announced plans to solicit private investment through long-term concessions to operate Canada’s four largest airports — Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary.
Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Senior Economist David Macdonald has warned that airport privatization converts public, nonprofit infrastructure into a vehicle for extracting returns.
Because airports possess considerable monopoly power, he argues, private operators can generate profits through higher charges, reduced service quality, contracting out, layoffs, and downward pressure on wages.
Seen in this context, Bill C-39 is not an isolated labor law reform.
It belongs to a larger political-economic project aimed at reorganizing Canada around corporate priorities. The government is offering investors lower taxes, fewer regulations, new infrastructure opportunities, and access to formerly nonprofit public assets. It is simultaneously proposing greater state power over workers capable of disrupting the transportation networks on which that investment strategy depends.
Canadian business organizations have long complained about strikes at ports, railways and airlines. Bill C-39 translates that concern with “certainty” into regressive labor law reform. The state now reserves the authority to decide when workers’ economic power has become inconsistent with the “national interest.”