{"id":141040,"date":"2025-09-13T13:12:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T13:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/141040\/"},"modified":"2025-09-13T13:12:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T13:12:07","slug":"what-carneys-underwhelming-list-of-approval-ready-national-projects-tells-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/141040\/","title":{"rendered":"What Carney\u2019s underwhelming list of approval-ready national projects tells us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

The regulatory backlog that Mark Carney<\/a> inherited has been greatly exaggerated, including by the Prime Minister himself.<\/p>\n

That, at least, is the inescapable take-away from this week\u2019s culmination of the months-long search for major infrastructure and energy investments that could be accelerated through the fledgling Major Projects Office. <\/p>\n

As initially presented, that new Calgary-based enterprise was primarily tasked with accelerating project permitting \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Carney mostly stuck to that framing on Thursday, when he unveiled the initial lists of projects<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 because few, if any, of the projects on them are actually stuck in permitting purgatory.<\/p>\n

Reality check: The first \u2018major projects\u2019 for fast-tracking are already on the fast track<\/a><\/p>\n

In the case of five projects being immediately referred to the Major Projects Office, that\u2019s on account of approval having mostly already been granted<\/a> under former prime minister Justin Trudeau.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Others are already happening. That includes the small modular reactor being built at Ontario\u2019s nuclear power plant in Darlington, which has a licence from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Another, Foran Mining Corp.\u2019s McIlvenna Bay copper mine in Saskatchewan, is already half built and on pace to start operating next year. The Port of Montreal\u2019s expansion is set to be in motion soon, and any necessary permits were already expected<\/a> within a matter of weeks.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Otherwise, the national-interest designation appears mostly to be a way of chasing early wins. <\/p>\n

Indigenous council member believes concerns on major projects will be addressed during approval process<\/a><\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s 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\u2019s oil sands, offshore wind in Nova Scotia, high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City, upgrades to Manitoba\u2019s Port of Churchill, an Arctic economic and security corridor, and Ontario\u2019s Ring of Fire along with other large-scale mining opportunities.<\/p>\n

By Mr. Carney\u2019s acknowledgment, those are all \u201cat an earlier stage,\u201d which is to say they\u2019re mostly not seeking approvals at the moment. He\u2019s referring them to the Major Projects Office so that \u201cbusiness development units\u201d can help \u201ctransform their potential into reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that sounds like it\u2019s about more than just smoothing some regulatory routes, it\u2019s 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 \u2013 which means, to some extent, being an access point for public funds.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Pathways Alliance\u2019s carbon-capture project<\/a>, 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. <\/p>\n

Ottawa working toward pipeline, oil sands growth with carbon capture project<\/a><\/p>\n

The biggest obstacle to the undertaking has been<\/a> that neither the oil-sands giants nor the government have yet proven willing to take on more than $10-billion in revenue risk \u2013 even after Mr. Trudeau made deal-seeking on that front one of the primary focuses of the Canada Growth Fund, a federal financing agency.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fairly obvious, from the moving targets, that Mr. Carney underestimated the scale and complexity of those sorts of challenges.<\/p>\n

He could yet have more success than Mr. Trudeau did in bargaining or strong-arming or innovating his way to overcoming them.<\/p>\n

And even if there\u2019s little or no regulatory fast-tracking to be done right away, the signals being sent about willingness to do so \u2013 even the easy victories being chased by ostensibly expediting that first list of projects already happening \u2013 could help bring more proposals forward. If Canada\u2019s permitting environment had been considered friendlier to begin with, there would probably be more projects in the queue now.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: The LNG Canada facility in Kitimat, B.C., September, 2023. Prime Minister Mark Carney…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":141041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46,2922],"class_list":["post-141040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy","tag-noastack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}