David LePage

Carney got asked point-blank about Canada’s well-earned reputation for being slow — the kind of slowness that makes capital walk. He gave the investor-summit version of the speech: time kills deals, “one project, one review, one year,” cooperation deals with eight provinces, more legislation coming, let’s all focus on what we’re for What he didn’t mention is the extra machinery he bolted on top of the existing mess Instead of ripping out the duplicative reviews, endless conditions, and risk-averse culture that actually make projects crawl, Ottawa stood up new parallel offices (Major Projects Office, Build Canada Homes, Defence Investment Agency) staffed with private-sector names and given special carve-outs. That’s not streamlining. That’s another layer of process, another set of conditions, another political filter deciding which projects get the fast lane. Many here have been saying the quiet part out loud for months: you don’t fix a bloated system by creating more offices to work around it The “quick no” and one-year clock sound great in a room full of global investors. They land differently when the same government has already expanded ministerial exemption powers, added new coordinators and hubs, and still has the old Impact Assessment machinery sitting there for everything that isn’t politically designated a “nation-building” favourite Recognition of the problem is cheap. Pretending the extra bureaucracy you just created isn’t part of the problem is why capital still has choices — and why a lot of it will choose to allocate elsewhere Centrally planned projects, self-selected and promoted by politicians, under side skirted existing legislation and underwritten by gullible taxpayers will fix that too, right? @MarkJCarney