As pretty much everyone knows, Canada has a building problem. Whether it’s provincial building of housing or infrastructure, or national building of highways, pipelines or energy production facilities, Canada can seemingly not get things built no matter how many companies and investors propose projects (or how many newspaper opinion columns or public opinion polls shows that people want things built).

The Carney government appears to recognize this problem and recently introduced Bill C-5. Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Superficially, a lot of what’s in the proposed bill sounds good: facilitating free trade and labour mobility inter-provincially, and ostensibly streamlining government’s regulatory powers to facilitate the timely building of projects deemed to be in Canada’s national interests. Who could be against that?

Per the government, the “Bill seeks to get projects in the national interest built by focusing on a small number of executable projects and shifting the focus of federal reviews from ‘whether’ to build these projects to ‘how’ to best advance them.” Again, looks great, but even a cursory reading by a legal layman reveals the fact that, in reality, little has changed in regard to the approval of major building projects in Canada. Just as it is now, under the new regime, the prime minister’s office (and designees elsewhere in government) ultimately have carte blanche in deciding whether or not projects of significance can be built in Canada, under what timeline, and based on whatever criteria they deem appropriate.

All that is better than nothing, of course, but words (particularly political words) are cheap and actions more valuable. If Prime Minister Carney really wants to show he’s committed to “Building Canada” he’d ceremoniously defenestrate Bill C-48 (a.k.a. the “Tanker Ban Bill”), which came into effect last year under the Trudeau government and changed tanker regulations off British Columbia’s northern coast, torpedoing any prospects of building oil export pipelines on Canada’s west coast.

He could also scrap the cap on Canadian oil and gas-related greenhouse gas emissions (introduced by the Trudeau government in 2024) and regulations (also introduced in 2024) for methane emissions in the oil and gas sector, both of which will almost inevitably raise costs and curtail production.

Finally, the prime minister could ax the so-called “Clean Electricity Regulations” that will likely drive electricity rates through the roof while ushering in an age of less-reliable electricity supply and less building of conventional energy-generation from natural gas, a fuel far more reliable than Canada’s fickle winds and often-tepid sunlight. By driving up energy costs across Canada and through the entire chain of production and service economies, these regulations (again, enacted by the Trudeau government) will make it more expensive to build anything anywhere in Canada.

Prime Minister Carney has made some nice noises seemingly recognizing that Canada has a building problem, particularly with regard to energy projects, and Bill C-5 makes equally nice (yet ill-defined) noises about regulatory reform in the energy and natural resource sectors. But Canada doesn’t have a shortage of nebulous government pronouncements; it has an overdose of regulatory restrictions preventing building in Canada. He should show real seriousness and eliminate the raft of Trudeau-era red tape stifling growth and development in Canada.

And sooner is better than later. Canada’s biggest economic competitors (not only the United States) are not sitting on their red-taped hands watching their economies decline.

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute