Beneath all the noise, around the sweeping legislation with which Mark Carney kicked off this fall’s parliamentary sitting, lies his second attempt at tearing down one of the biggest and most longstanding obstacles to Canada’s economic competitiveness and opportunity.
For what feels like forever, companies seeking to build new mines or power stations or pipelines or ports have complained about having to navigate a federal approvals process that can verge on Kafkaesque.
With 14 different federal departments or agencies holding permitting power, and at least a handful of them typically overlapping on any given proposal, major projects have tended to take about five years to get green-lit. And that’s long enough to scare off many would-be proponents from trying to get them built in the first place.
Hot off last year’s election campaign, Carney hurriedly attempted a quick fix, via the Building Canada Act. But it mostly just created a workaround that would allow select projects to bypass normal processes if they were deemed by Ottawa to be in the national interest — a designation nobody has proven eager to seek, partly for fear of court challenges. It also created yet another agency, the Major Projects Office, to help navigate pre-existing ones.
The do-over that he unveiled this week to kick off the fall parliamentary sitting is a much different story.
There’s already lots of controversy around the new (and confusingly similarly named) Building Canada Strong Act, much of it around changes to labour law that the government chose to lump in with the regulatory ones. Carney’s unrelenting inclination to impress everyone with the scope of his ambition, in this case with an omnibus bill touted as “the most consequential economic legislation” of this era, has its downsides.
But few people familiar with Ottawa’s byzantine inner workings would disagree with the permitting culture shift that he’s trying to engineer. And the way he’s mostly going about it looks a lot more promising than last time around.
Instead of just cherry-picking a few well-lobbied pitches, the government is now promising to get all major projects approved (or rejected) within a year, through a complex set of proposed changes that largely boil down to a few fundamentals.
One is to conduct all reviews across those many departments (for instance involving impacts on waterways or wildlife) simultaneously, not sequentially as has tended to happen, and then have approvals granted in one fell swoop by the environment minister rather than scattershot by half of cabinet.
Another is to strengthen the ability of a single federal entity to oversee and serve as a single entry point for those processes, including by giving leadership of some of them to the Canada Energy Regulator or Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (whose specialized expertise are supposed to help speed things up) rather than just the Impact Assessment Agency.
And in a similar vein, Carney is proposing to create a single hub for most Crown-Indigenous consultations, which are currently as diffuse as other processes in a way that arguably serves neither side’s interests.
None of this is foolproof, and there’s no guarantee it’ll get all decisions down to 12 months. But if it comes close to that, it’ll move Canada from the slower end of project approvals toward the front of the pack among comparable countries, including the United States.
It’s also not exactly a dramatic rightward shift. Quite a bit of it is stuff that the government was also toying with under Justin Trudeau, but never got around to.
All of which makes it a bit frustrating that Carney couldn’t resist the temptation to combine it with more contentious measures — even just on the project-permitting side, let alone the strange stew he cooked up by tossing in policies meant to reduce work-stopping labour disputes.
If you’re worried about existing environmental protections or Indigenous engagement requirements being softened, for instance, there’s legitimate cause for concern in the bill’s proposal to create “regions of national interest” in which blanket permitting conditions could be set, reducing scrutiny of each individual project.
Likewise the prospect of ministerial approval in select cases for early work on projects to begin before approvals have been granted, since it’s not hard to imagine pressure on the government to not then stop that work in its tracks.
Those components of the purportedly generational piece of legislation are at once more marginal, in terms of how much they’ll come into play and the extent to which they’ll improve the investment climate, and riskier in terms of tipping the scales.
Better Carney had stuck to finally lighting a fire under the system to enforce existing protections as quickly and predictably as possible, which is what’s really going to get Canada built (stronger).
