Pathways to prosperity – How federally mandated “Trans-Canada Corridors” can unlock our natural resources potential: Martin Ignasiak and Heather Exner-Pirot for Inside Policy – MLI
March 10, 2025
Canada’s unpredictable and overly complicated regulatory processes cost Canadians tens of billions and prevents us from meeting our greatest national priority: diversification of our trade partners.
Canada is in a chaotic and unprincipled trade war initiated by what has historically been its most-reliable trade ally, and it’s being combined with aggressive threats of annexation. Ensuring Canada’s future sovereignty and economic prosperity requires the development of critical infrastructure connecting our producers of natural resources to our coasts, from which alternative markets, hungry for our resources, can be supplied.
Unfortunately, private capital is loathe to invest in the infrastructure projects required to accomplish this critical objective. Those who previously tried are still recovering from the wounds inflicted upon them. In the case of Enbridge’s Gateway or TC Energy’s Energy East, they dedicated years, and significant capital, to advancing projects that ultimately died due to a lack of support from political leaders. Private capital similarly abandoned the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) because of Canada’s dysfunctional regulatory processes and weak rule of law, which allowed a province and municipality to frustrate a project that the Government of Canada had declared in the national public interest.
