As Prime Minister Mark Carney prepares to host the world’s largest banks and financial institutions at next week’s Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, a new report warns that the government’s “commitment to move faster” on major projects won’t be enough to secure the $1 trillion in capital it wants to attract by 2031.
The report by the CD Howe Institute, a business think tank, argues that key regulatory reforms are needed to give “long-horizon investors” the market certainty they need to back giant “nation-building” projects to help reindustrialize the economy.
“Canada’s renewed focus on building major projects is welcome, but investors willing to invest in long-term projects need to know what rules apply, who ultimately decides whether a project proceeds, and whether an approval will endure through political change,” Kate Koplovich, senior policy analyst at CD Howe, told Canada’s National Observer.
The report, Clear the Way: Does the Building Canada Act Help Canada Build?, lands as Carney and his cabinet gather this week in Banff, Alta., for their fall planning forum amid an escalating trade war with the US.
It also comes against the backdrop of a swiftly evolving federal energy transition strategy that hinges on turning big-ticket infrastructure and energy investment commitments into shovels in the ground, including the $70-billion clean energy deal signed by Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador last month.
‘More predictable, less political’
George Vegh, a senior fellow at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy and the report’s co-author, said the priority now is a regulatory system that gives investors confidence that major projects will actually get built.
“The next step is creating a more predictable, less political regulatory process that gives investors the confidence to commit to the major projects Canada needs to strengthen investment and productivity,” Vegh said.
The report recommends giving “expert regulators” final say over project approvals, simplifying project reviews, and enforcing statutory time limits. Those changes would improve the federal Major Projects Office, which oversees 27 projects worth a combined $192 billion in investment and 330,000 jobs, but remains exposed to “political discretion” and open-ended review criteria, the report said.
“Canada has made progress in shortening some approval timelines through administrative improvements, but more work remains,” Vegh said.
Regulatory certainty is only half of the construction challenge. Even if Ottawa succeeds in attracting the capital it wants and can accelerate projects through a streamlined approvals process, Canada still faces a more fundamental constraint: whether it has the skilled workers to build them.
A labour problem too
A separate report, Jobs for Today: Canada’s Building Trades and the Net-Zero Transition, calculates that meeting Canada’s stated net-zero commitments by 2050 will require 6.3 million to 9.5 million job-years of construction work, and a permanent employee base of some 350,000 workers.
The recently signed Quebec-Newfoundland wind and hydro power deal — the largest ever in the North American clean energy industry — shows the economic development potential of this scale of project, said the authors, and could serve as a model for a broader green-construction boom.
The megaproject, which would see development of some 14,000 megawatts of renewables generation and hundreds of kilometers of transmission lines, would have an impact “far beyond clean power,” they said, pointing to government estimates that the agreement would lead to the creation of 23,000 jobs and $31 billion to GDP by the early 2040s.
“[The deal] will create far more jobs for construction and trades workers, and have a longer impact on Canada’s economy and environment, than any [oil and gas] pipeline,” said Jim Stanford, director of the Centre for Future Work, and one of the report authors.
“It is concrete proof that accelerating renewable energy will usher in an employment boom unlike any we have experienced before,” he said.
Finance Canada spokesperson John Fragos said the government had “actioned a bold economic agenda, leveraging its tax competitiveness and investment attractiveness, that is already drawing record investment, FDI [foreign direct investment] and overall interest in Canada — and will continue to do so.”
He added that Budget 2026 would “harness this progress” to support the work of the Major Projects Office and the one project-one-review regulatory change to “move with scale, speed and purpose… to help us expand our growth and competitiveness agenda.”
Ministers’ ‘monumental task’
Federal ministers meeting in Banff, Alta., on Sept. 10 for their annual two-day fall planning forum have set themselves a mission statement of “building with greater speed and ambition,” according to a press statement.
Today, Ottawa launched Proposals for Getting Major Projects Built in Canada, an intelligence gathering report drawing from over 26,000 submissions, including over 400 from Indigenous peoples and industry, academia, provincial, territorial and municipal government.
Yet the scope of the potential energy infrastructure build-out also highlights the extraordinary challenge facing the federal government. Doubling Canada’s grid capacity by 2050, a goal of the government’s national electricity strategy, is “a monumental task,” Stanford said.
Meeting Canada’s 2015 Paris Agreement emissions-reduction pledges — which the country is currently off-track to achieve — would require a 20 to 30 per cent increase in the national construction workforce, the report projected. But that far exceeds the sector’s current head-count.
“This is what nation-building looks like,” said Lee Loftus, a report co-author from the Climate Industry Research Team.
“Canada cannot achieve energy security, economic resilience or its climate objectives without building substantially more clean electricity and the infrastructure required to move that electricity,” he said.
“Canada must match its investment in infrastructure with an equally serious investment in skilled trades training, apprenticeships, recruitment and retention,” Loftus added.
For ministers meeting this week — and for global investors in Toronto on Sept. 14-15 — the question will not only be about luring in investment for multi-billion-dollar projects, but how to convert that capital into steel, concrete and electrons. And at a time when the US tariff war is testing the country’s economic resilience.
“Trump’s erratic trade policies are causing uncertainty around future exports to the US, including exports of clean-energy technology,” Stanford told CNO.
“But at the same time, if the federal government puts priority on clean energy in its overall national economic strategy, there will be ample opportunities for those industries right here at home,” he added.
September 9th 2026
