The right moment for big ambitions: Accelerating national priority projects

 
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Turning to national priority projects in times of volatility is an age-old concept, which Canadians know well. In 1866, the U.S. backed out of the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty (an early form of free trade agreement) and reinstated tariffs against the then-British colonies. This was intended to buttress U.S. industry and advance “manifest destiny”, a long-held U.S. ambition for territorial expansion to the west and north. Not coincidentally, the 1867 confederation of the Dominion of Canada gave birth to a fiercely independent new nation and an expedited cross-country railway mega-project which has become part of our foundational lore. It also resulted in fortifying Canadian sovereignty, and the rapid expansion of European trade routes, among other beneficial outcomes.

In the face of the current trade war that threatens to undermine the Canadian economy and sovereignty, that history can offer some vivid lessons for an effective response. There is a building consensus among industry, government and the general public that our future depends more than ever on advancing critical projects with much greater speed¹. The current environment calls on Canadian governments, business and industry to return to promoting national priority projects in service of the country’s ongoing stability and prosperity. Refocusing our efforts on national priority projects worked before, and will work again.

In this article we discuss some of the features of “national priority” projects—and what efforts can be taken to start building them quickly in a way that validates the country’s sovereignty and supports both the domestic and export economies.

What are the goals of national priority projects?

National priority projects have a strategic value that transcends economic return. These highest priority projects are intended to achieve one or more of (1) self-reliance, (2) economic resilience or (3) sovereignty signaling. Projects in support of these three objectives include the following:

1. Self-reliance: projects that cross provincial boundaries and enhance the transportation of goods, resources and people across Canada, strengthening domestic connectivity and reducing interprovincial trade barriers.
2. Economic resilience: projects that enable a greater diversity of domestic and international trade relationships. This includes establishing trade corridors or zones, facilitating access to non-U.S. economies and pivoting from our historical predominant reliance on the U.S. trade and security relationship to increased engagement with other markets, including underutilized domestic trade opportunities.
3. Defending or asserting Canada’s sovereignty: projects that enhance stability and security in service of asserting and demonstrating Canadian sovereignty. This can include infrastructure that enhances our protection and borders such as physical projects in the Arctic, and also national unity projects that bring Canada and Indigenous communities closer together.

Projects of national importance have an eye to Canada’s long-term future and prosperity, and are worthwhile in every political and economic context. Yet, in the face of a turbulent relationship with our dominant trading partner, arguably representing an existential crisis, such projects must be accelerated to achieve these ends.

We recommend an expedited approach to perhaps a few dozen national priority projects as an appropriate response to our current context. We do not argue here for reform to the thousands of other projects of lower priority. Focus will be the key to success of this initiative.

What projects should be accelerated?

Projects in service of these three key objectives range from military hubs in the Arctic to infrastructure corridors that enable transport of our natural resources and critical minerals to tidewater. National priority projects need not be limited to “mega-projects”—for example, small modular nuclear reactors in support of digital infrastructure projects of national interest. Our table below highlights a range of potential national priority projects that satisfy a combination of key domestic and international trade goals and/or work to assert sovereignty.

What steps do we need to take?

1. Establish trade corridors or zones

Trade corridors or zones would connect the country and accelerate diversification of international trade relationships. Trade corridors are horizontal infrastructure routes associated with transportation of goods and resources, such as port expansions or rail upgrades, or a national transmission grid. For instance, the Trans-Canada Highway can be seen as a trade corridor. Trade corridors offer multiple benefits including speeding up movements of resources and goods, reducing costs and enhancing connectivity to Canada’s three coasts. Indeed, a 2025 Statistics Canada report found that roughly 46 percent of businesses surveyed cited various transportation challenges or the distance between point of origin and destination as reasons to not purchase goods or services from another province or territory². Early efforts by the federal government include establishing a National Trade Corridors Fund to support projects that address a trade corridor function, but this fund does not itself establish physical corridors³.

Canada should streamline a process to identify and designate broad geographic goods and services trade corridors/routes/zones and ease the permitting process for national priority projects within them. How would we identify national priority projects to be built within a trade corridor or zone? To start, governments could work together to create an inventory of live and potential infrastructure projects which address capacity constraints in areas such as critical mineral transport, defense positions and ports⁴. From this inventory, Cabinet could then designate specific infrastructure projects as National Priority Projects, eligible for expedited development within a National Priority Projects corridor or zone. Corridors might receive broad approval for multiple designated projects (e.g., building a pipeline or transmission line in the same corridor as a railway).

A Canadian Northern Corridor?

Canada must also consider strengthening our current efforts to improve infrastructure access in and to Canada’s north, including through enhanced investments with communications and airport infrastructure, deep water ports and enabling road, rail and power infrastructure. The University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy has been providing research for establishing a “Canadian Northern Corridor” which would connect pathways and link Canada’s northern communities and projects across three coasts⁵. Many of these projects could have overlap with military infrastructure, such as military bases and ice-capable patrol ships. These projects would enhance Canada’s self-reliance and economic resilience, and reinforce Canada’s sovereignty over, among other things, shipping lanes through the Arctic⁶. While the federal government recently announced funding to establish northern military operational support hubs in Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Inuvik, more must be done to develop the Arctic as a major trade route and reinforce Canada’s military presence⁷.

2. Expedited approvals

Long, uncertain regulatory approval processes have hampered complex projects in Canada for many years. In the current context, projects of national importance deserve clear, predictable rules and more nimble decision-making to enhance Canada’s economic security and sovereignty.

One logical option is to establish “one-window” approval processes for various classes of national priority projects, as a way to reduce regulatory redundancies across orders of government⁸. The March 21 First Ministers’ statement recognizes the need to eliminate federal and provincial overlap on environmental assessment but more would need to be done to get to a genuinely one-window process⁹.

There are at least three potential approaches to the appropriate legislative reform:

• Establish global or framework legislation for all national priority projects: New legislation could exclusively address all projects of designated national priority, or groups of projects within industry sectors of designated national priority (e.g., critical minerals). Alternatively, framework legislation could permit government to designate a particular trade corridor and provide a process through which Cabinet can develop bespoke approval requirements for national priority projects that propose to locate there. Legislation could provide broad exemptions or carve outs to otherwise prevailing statutory requirements for such designated projects, prioritize large investments, and establish accelerated project timelines with clear performance benchmarks.
• Establish project-specific legislation: Legislation created for a single national priority project could provide needed certainty and direction for how the project is to be developed. For example, Nova Scotia’s Maritime Link Act was implemented with the clear purpose of providing a “predictable, timely and transparent regulatory review process” to develop the subsea electric transmission system between that province and Newfoundland and Labrador¹⁰.
• Utilize or tweak existing legislation: Canada already has national security and national emergency rules in place to exempt certain projects from the typical approval process. For instance, the federal Impact Assessment Act allows the Governor-in-Council to exclude a designated project from the Act’s application if the project is one for which there are matters of national security¹¹. Some experts have argued that accelerating pipeline infrastructure is a matter of national security and strategic importance as Canada-U.S. tensions rise¹². It may be possible to engage existing national security carve outs within existing legislation, although a surgical amendment to add national priority projects would offer valuable clarity.

3. Provide clear governmental leadership and investment

Clear leadership from government would galvanize and encourage Canadian sovereignty and growth. Cooperative federalism is the optimal approach to facilitate national priority projects through greater collaboration among federal, provincial and territorial orders of government. The federal government’s oversight power can be leveraged by convening meetings with provincial counterparts and using its spending power to encourage cooperation. For example, the federal government may help to fund programs serving to address regional inequities if there are any temporary dislocations or disadvantages flowing from reducing interprovincial trade barriers. Two March meetings of First Ministers demonstrate building alignment across the country to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers and to the shared priority of a national trade and energy corridor, deserving of continued discussion¹³.

While cooperative federalism may be ideal, the urgent and existential context may require the need for an assertive project champion to take the lead on a national priority project. The federal government may be best situated to take up this mantle in most situations, but provinces could also take up the leadership role depending on the circumstances.

Constitutional context

Since early in Canada’s history, most economic regulation has fallen to the provinces. Historically, the courts strengthened the provincial “property and civil rights” power while de-emphasizing the federal “trade and commerce” power. The 1982 enactment of section 92A of the Constitution Act, granting extensive powers to the provinces in relation to the management of natural resources, reinforced the provincial role as the primary regulator of most projects. One notable exception has been interprovincial undertakings—including railways, pipelines and highways that cross provincial boundaries—but that federal power has often been exercised in a manner that results in extensive regulatory duplication, overlap and inefficiency. It is not uncommon for the complex, multijurisdictional approval processes of these projects to take several years, and to become entangled in litigation.

Ultimately, the federal government is responsible for protecting the interests of the country as a whole. In challenging economic times, this may require it to assert increased leadership. This can occur in two distinct ways. First, for projects that are already interprovincial in nature (or that otherwise fall within federal jurisdiction, such as airports and shipping ports), the federal government may need to more confidently assert its jurisdiction to reduce the burden and delay of local approval processes. Permitting entities with broad powers under statutes like the Canada Transportation Act, can, for example, exercise those powers to fast-track projects of unusual importance.

But the federal government also has plenary powers that can be exercised in the right circumstances. One example is the power to declare any work to be “for the general advantage of Canada” under section 92(10)(c) of the Constitution. When Parliament explicitly declares a work to have this attribute, the federal government assumes exclusive jurisdiction over the regulation and approval of that work. This section has been used nearly 500 times over the years, mostly in relation to local rail projects. A wide variety of other infrastructure projects have also been declared “for the general advantage of Canada”, including bridges, dams, wharves, mines and oil refineries and factories.

Other tools that might be used include the residual power under the constitution to make laws under the “national concern” branch of “the Peace Order and good Government of Canada”, and the legislative power under the federal Emergencies Act (which replaced the War Measures Act). The latter was suggested in a recent Open Letter to Federal Leaders by Canadian Oil and Gas Companies, which noted: “By declaring a Canadian energy crisis and key projects in the “national interest”, the federal government will be able to use all its available emergency powers to ensure that the dramatic regulatory restructuring required to expand the oil and natural gas sector is rapidly achieved”. Recent case law emerging from the Trucker Convoy of 2022 reinforces the high threshold that must be met before the federal government can employ its national emergency powers. Whether that threshold would be met in the current circumstances remains to be seen.

4. Indigenous involvement

Mobilizing the support and participation of Indigenous communities would strengthen some of Canada’s most important relationships and would be critical to efficiently developing certain national priority projects. Indigenous communities across Canada have shown their interest and willingness to be involved in large project development, which would help to unlock projects that reinforce Canada’s national interests. Further, on past large-scale projects, multiple government agencies conducting parallel Indigenous consultation and accommodation exercises and parallel determinations of the discharge of the duty to consult, have caused confusion and delays. Simplifying and enhancing that process for national priority projects should be a top priority.

Conclusion

The current trade dispute has been characterized as an existential threat. It is also a once-in-a-generation nation-building opportunity. We think Canada can seize the moment by accelerating national priority projects through new trade corridors or zones, expedited regulatory approvals, clear governmental leadership and mobilizing the support and participation of Indigenous communities across the country.

 
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