Prime minister Mark Carney has announced the next group of what he’s calling ‘nation building projects’ for Canada, designed to boost the nation’s competitiveness and make it less reliant on the United States.
The new tranche of mega-projects spread across Canada includes critical mineral extraction, a transmission line and a liquified natural gas facility.
Carney says the transformational projects represent $56 billion in new investment and will create 68,000 jobs. They include an energy transmission line in northwestern British Columbia to power new mines and export expansion. Also planned in BC, a liquified natural gas plant which will become Canada’s second largest. Further east, projects include a nickel mine in northern Ontario, a graphite mine in Quebec to provide input for battery supply chains and defense applications, a tungsten mine in New Brunswick, and a hydroelectric project in Nunavut.
“These are projects that will connect, diversify and propel forward our economy,” Carney said. “Projects that will help us expand our exports to new partners. Projects that will create hundreds of thousands of good paying union jobs for Canadian workers.”
The projects will be overseen by the new Major Projects Office, which is designed to fast-track the infrastructure needed, cutting time from the process of approval and development.
“Our job is all about making sure that people get across the line, get everything they need to get it built on time and on budget,” said Dawn Farrell, chief executive officer of the Major Projects Office.
The leader of the official opposition Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre, says he’s skeptical about Carney’s new office.
“He’s created yet another bureaucracy, a new bureaucratic hurdle for miners, for oil and gas enterprises and other resource companies to jump through in order to get anything approve,” Poilievre said.
But Carney says in addition to the projects already announced, he talked about the northwest critical conservation corridor in Northwest BC and the Yukon, where there are vast deposits of critical minerals.
“With respect to critical minerals, by 2050 global demand for those minerals is expect to increase fivefold, five times,” he said. “The problem is, at present, the supply of those resources is highly concentrated in one country and is very risky. What the world wants is Canada to be the reliable supplier of critical minerals as the world moves toward building a more sustainable economy.”
Among the projects Carney outlined was the proposed Crawford Nickel mine in northern Ontario, eventually expected to be the largest nickel sulfide mine in the western world. Ontario premier Doug Ford has pushed for this project but is after more.
“We welcome the support for the Crawford Nickel Mine. This is a big one for Canada. But on the large-scale nuclear, our premier’s been very clear to the feds. If we want to do nation building, you have to invest and support a $256 billion R&D into the national GDP. We believe that there is a path to get federal support for large-scale nuclear,” said Stephen Lecce, Ontario’s Energy and Mines Minister.
So far, none of the announced projects have received any official designation. But Carney says the referral he’s made helps those projects achieve a streamlined process and financing, and being on the referral list provides more confidence that the projects will go ahead.
Premiers are largely supporting his initiatives since they would bring benefits to their regions. Carney is also pushing his ‘buy Canadian’ policy to apply to major projects.
