The LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C., September, 2023. Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled the initial lists of projects on Thursday.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
The regulatory backlog that Mark Carney inherited has been greatly exaggerated, including by the Prime Minister himself.
That, at least, is the inescapable take-away from this week’s culmination of the months-long search for major infrastructure and energy investments that could be accelerated through the fledgling Major Projects Office.
As initially presented, that new Calgary-based enterprise was primarily tasked with accelerating project permitting – including through streamlined processes in the contentious Bill C-5, which was put into law in June. The implication was that an array of nation-building projects was nearly shovel-ready, if only Ottawa and the provinces would give the green light rather than leaving them awash in red tape.
Mr. Carney mostly stuck to that framing on Thursday, when he unveiled the initial lists of projects that the office is being asked to take on. There were the now-familiar reminders of how we used to build stuff in this country, and the promises to do so anew by cutting through the slow, duplicative, politically indifferent approval processes that get in the way.
Nobody familiar with trying to get projects big and small through layers of bureaucracy really contests that premise. But the lists themselves suggested that matters are considerably more complicated than Mr. Carney has made them out to be – because few, if any, of the projects on them are actually stuck in permitting purgatory.
Reality check: The first ‘major projects’ for fast-tracking are already on the fast track
In the case of five projects being immediately referred to the Major Projects Office, that’s on account of approval having mostly already been granted under former prime minister Justin Trudeau.
The most attention-grabbing of them, the proposed Phase 2 expansion of the LNG Canada export terminal in Kitimat, B.C., is currently awaiting a final investment decision.
Others are already happening. That includes the small modular reactor being built at Ontario’s nuclear power plant in Darlington, which has a licence from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Another, Foran Mining Corp.’s McIlvenna Bay copper mine in Saskatchewan, is already half built and on pace to start operating next year. The Port of Montreal’s expansion is set to be in motion soon, and any necessary permits were already expected within a matter of weeks.
Among the five, only an expansion of the Red Chris copper mine in northern B.C. seems to currently face permitting uncertainty, largely at the provincial level.
Otherwise, the national-interest designation appears mostly to be a way of chasing early wins.
Then there’s the second list, also announced by Mr. Carney on Thursday, of six other prospects that are much more aspirational: the Pathways Alliance carbon-capture project in Alberta’s oil sands, offshore wind in Nova Scotia, high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City, upgrades to Manitoba’s Port of Churchill, an Arctic economic and security corridor, and Ontario’s Ring of Fire along with other large-scale mining opportunities.
By Mr. Carney’s acknowledgment, those are all “at an earlier stage,” which is to say they’re mostly not seeking approvals at the moment. He’s referring them to the Major Projects Office so that “business development units” can help “transform their potential into reality.”
If that sounds like it’s about more than just smoothing some regulatory routes, it’s perhaps telling that Mr. Carney has started talking recently about a secondary role for the Major Projects Office, in helping co-ordinate and structure financing – which means, to some extent, being an access point for public funds.
That seems a tacit acknowledgment that for the longer-term national-interest projects that Ottawa is eyeing, there are financial viability questions that need to be resolved as much or more than permitting ones.
Pathways Alliance’s carbon-capture project, which Mr. Carney is particularly eager to get done as part of an attempted grand bargain with Alberta that would also involve more oil production, is a case in point.
Ottawa working toward pipeline, oil sands growth with carbon capture project
The biggest obstacle to the undertaking has been that neither the oil-sands giants nor the government have yet proven willing to take on more than $10-billion in revenue risk – even after Mr. Trudeau made deal-seeking on that front one of the primary focuses of the Canada Growth Fund, a federal financing agency.
It’s fairly obvious, from the moving targets, that Mr. Carney underestimated the scale and complexity of those sorts of challenges.
He could yet have more success than Mr. Trudeau did in bargaining or strong-arming or innovating his way to overcoming them.
And even if there’s little or no regulatory fast-tracking to be done right away, the signals being sent about willingness to do so – even the easy victories being chased by ostensibly expediting that first list of projects already happening – could help bring more proposals forward. If Canada’s permitting environment had been considered friendlier to begin with, there would probably be more projects in the queue now.
But it may have been a bit naive, hubristic, or both for the new Prime Minister to give the impression that launching a wave of nation-defining infrastructure was a matter of snapping his fingers, after the previous PM sat on his hands. If it were just about will, more would already be getting built.