Nearly a year after Parliament passed the Building Canada Act (BCA) with promises to urgently advance projects across the country, not a single project has been formally designated under the legislation—and policy experts are questioning whether the law was ever capable of delivering the results the Carney government promised.
A new intelligence memo from the C.D. Howe Institute, published June 11, argues the BCA has compounded the very problem it was designed to solve.
“Rather than creating a clearer and more predictable approvals framework, these changes expand federal discretion and further politicize the regulatory process,” wrote George Vegh, a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and Kate Koplovich, a senior policy analyst at the C.D. Howe Institute.
The stakes for Canada’s economic future are large. The number of oil and gas projects in the Carney government’s major project inventory has fallen 76 percent from its 2017 peak, a decline the authors describe as reflecting a “sustained erosion of investment confidence” in Canada’s energy sector over the past decade.
