This article originally appeared in the Western Standard.
By Ken Coates, December 1, 2025
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a second round of “major” projects in the “national interest.” Designed to mount a fast, impressive response to US President Donald Trump’s tariff war, Carney’s approach has failed to inspire confidence across the country. As a major economic plan, the Carney approach is a damp squib.
Most of the Prime Minister’s efforts are a veiled critique of the decade-long administration of his predecessor, Justin Trudeau. Each announcement makes it clear that Trudeau’s administration put the Canadian economy in a straitjacket, cluttered the economy with overregulation, dampened national prosperity, and scared away billions of dollars in investment.
The creation of the Major Projects Office is an admission of national economic and regulatory failures, more an impressive step forward.
In most cases, the current government is simply taking credit for the hard work of proponents. Others – a transmission line to the Yukon, the railway and port development centred on Churchill, an oil pipeline to the West Coast, the railway between Quebec City and Toronto – are unproven and bare-bones concepts. As the start of an economic resurgence, the government’s economic initiatives are the weight-loss equivalent of announcing a new diet.
Churn in major projects is also normal. Major projects, like the Trans Mountain Pipeline, Coastal Gas Link Pipeline, Site C Dam in BC, LNG Canada in Kitimat, and the Northwest Territories’ diamond mines, have closed or are slowing down. Unless something larger-scale is included on future lists, national employment will be lucky to stay level.
The Trump-inspired job losses and the potential new jobs do not overlap well. The northern provinces and a few other locations will benefit, but tariffs are hitting hardest at central Canadian industry and the canola fields on the prairies. Will the displaced workers from shuttered auto plants in Ontario find work on the pipelines and LNG plants in northern BC? Work associated with a much-needed hydro plant in Nunavut, a potential multi-generational nickel mine near Timmins, or a long-delayed tungsten mine in New Brunswick will not offset large-scale Canadian job losses.
There is no grand strategy here. Quebec’s largely successful plans for the development of the North have much more substance than this largely incoherent approach.
There are promising elements. The indigenous-controlled LNG plant and pipeline proposed for northern BC will change the region. The still uncertain re-development of the Hudson Bay Railway, Port of Churchill, and the extension of roads and the electric grid to Nunavut could be a truly nation-building initiative. Others, like a heavily touted fast train from Quebec City to Toronto, are more a gesture to the government’s political base than a nation-transforming project.
But these small pieces do not even hint at a new national economy. At best, they reflect a nineteenth-century and post-World War II approach to prosperity-building. The Carney government has proponents across the country lobbying hard for their projects, but seeking favour from Ottawa is the oldest game in Canadian politics and the farthest thing from the foundation for a new economic order.
The core elements of a transformative twenty-first-century economy, which require a reform of Canadian intellectual property regimes and a strategy for expanding the high-tech sector, are missing in the Government’s plan. There is nothing in the current approach that will unify the country, save for adding to the ever-lengthening line-up of supplicants at the door of the Prime Minister’s office.
Is this the best Canada can do? If so, it is a sad testament to Canada’s economic and political shortcomings. Of course, the country should build infrastructure and develop resources much faster. But twenty-first-century prosperity requires a truly bold approach that responds to the country’s economic potential and promises real and substantial change.
The development plan of the Carney government has some, but not much, of what Canada truly needs. The nation continues to look for the easy way out of a crisis that is largely of our making. We need much more imaginative thinking if the country is to offset its dependence on America.
A few Major Projects do not add up to a new Canadian economy.
Ken Coates is a distinguished fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
