Despite Prime Minister Mark Carney’s hyperbole in announcing five “nation building” projects Thursday, what he actually proclaimed was rather modest in scope.
The projects are not new and many of them have already spent years on Canada’s regulatory run-around circuit.
Now they must go through Carney’s new Major Projects Office as well as intense scrutiny from a new Indigenous Advisory Council.
The projects — and all future projects — must also meet Liberal climate goals before they can be approved.
The prime minister may have talked about building big and building fast, but it sure looks like a lot of new red tape.
Carney began a press conference by mentioning some of Canada’s greatest building projects — our national railway, constructing thousands of homes after the Second World War, the Trans-Canada Highway, the St. Lawrence Seaway (“completed in just five years”, noted the prime minister) and Expo 67, the world fair which from concept to completion took only four years.
“The point of these examples is that we used to build big things in this country and we used to build them rapidly. It’s time to get back to it and it’s time to get on with it.
“That starts with getting out of the way. For too long the construction of major infrastructure in Canada has been stalled by arduous and inefficient approval processes, uncertainty, red tape, duplication and complicated review processes have held back and curbed investment,” said Carney.
What he didn’t say was that a lot of that regulatory red tape was a direct result of a decade of Liberal policy.
“One factor behind declining business investment is the heavy regulatory burden imposed by the current federal government on the extraction sector, which includes: mining, quarrying, and oil and gas,” said a Fraser Institute
last year.
“In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.”
The effect of all that red tape was that “Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.”
At his news conference, Carney claimed the Major Projects Office (MPO) would help with finance, the regulatory process and generally speed up timelines.
He also announced that he had set up an Indigenous Advisory Council to help guide the MPO in its work. He said the council had expertise in economic participation, impact assessments and UNDRIP, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
“The council will make sure that projects move forward in true partnership,” said Carney.
For a project to go forward it “must contribute to clean growth and Canada’s climate goals and it must advance the interest of Indigenous peoples.”
This is not getting out of the way; it is very much getting in the way.
The projects announced were: the expansion of the Red Chris Mine in British Columbia; building the McIlvenna Bay Foran Copper Mine in Saskatchewan to extract copper and zinc; expanding the Montreal Port in Contrecoeur; building a small modular reactor in Clarington, Ont., and expanding the LNG Canada export terminal in Kitimat, B.C.
Any slender hope that Carney might propose something really major like a pipeline were dashed. And yet that is precisely what Canada needs if it is to wean itself off the United States.
Carney acknowledged that tough times lay ahead, but seemed to imply that a new Canadian protectionist policy would solve the issue.
“The path ahead will not always be easier,” Carney said, noting that the global economy had been “ruptured.”
“The U.S. has fundamentally and rapidly transformed all of its trading relationships and the effects are both immediate and profound, they are closing markets, disrupting supply chains, halting investment and pushing up unemployment.”
But our destiny lay in our hands, he said.
“These projects will be at the heart of our new, comprehensive Buy Canadian policy. Because to strengthen Canadian independence, our resilience, our security, we will build with Canadian steel, Canadian lumber, Canadian aluminum and by Canadian trades people and engineers,” said the prime minister.
And then, in an echo of his fraudulent “Elbows Up” campaign, he took a swipe at the U.S.
“We are only just beginning,” he said. “Because we know, Canadians know, that we can give ourselves far more than any foreign government can take away and that we will build the brighter future for a confident Canada.”
Which is all very nice but does nothing for the oil and gas industry which is such a large part of Canada’s economy.
Europe is desperate for Canadian oil and gas, as European Parliament president Roberta Metsola
this week, but pipelines are anathema to the Liberals.
If Carney truly wants a brighter Canadian future, built on a thriving economy, then perhaps he should take his own advice — and get out of the way.
National Post