Governing fast and slow
Can Ottawa speed up? Borduas and the Refus global. And the case for a united Canada.
Louise Arbour, a retired justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, will be Canada’s 31st Governor-General, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced on Tuesday. Arbour, who is 79, will be installed as GG in early June, succeeding Mary Simon.
Can Ottawa speed up?
The journalist Matt Gurney took to social media this week to give an account of learning to ski that nicely captures our current policy moment. Gurney, a reluctant late-adopter on the slopes, found himself one afternoon going faster than he had ever gone. He was thrilled, genuinely proud, and entirely convinced he was finally getting it. Then the other skiers blew past him, with some of them appearing to be smiling encouragingly as they whizzed by. But it was hard to see them clearly because he was still very, very slow.
Gurney meant it as a metaphor for Ottawa’s relationship with project approvals, and it landed, because what this week made painfully clear is that Canada is operating on two entirely different clocks simultaneously. There is the clock of government, and the clock of the world, and the gap between them is so deeply structural it is not clear how they can be brought into sync.
The world’s clock does not run at the speed of Canada’s consultative-legislative timelines. At the Public Policy Forum’s annual dinner in Toronto this week, International Energy Agency head Fatih Birol warned dinner guests that Canada had been too slow, that it had a golden opportunity, and that the cost of missing this train would be “incredible.” He was not speaking hypothetically. Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas supplies since the American and Israeli bombing campaign against Iran began in February, prompting a global reckoning on energy policy. The window for Canada to become a major energy exporter to anxious allies is open, but it will not stay open forever.
Against that backdrop, the chorus of frustration from industry this week was striking. Cenovus CEO Jon McKenzie used four minutes of an earnings call to deliver what amounted to an indictment: Canadian policies had created a regulatory and investment environment “uncompetitive with the rest of the world,” ceding high-paying jobs, taxes, and royalties to countries like Russia, Iran, and Iraq. The Oil Sands Alliance published a statement calling progress on the federal-Alberta energy MOU too slow. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, standing in Carney’s office on Friday, told the Prime Minister directly: Alberta was “getting a bit impatient.“
Even Martha Hall Findlay, a former Liberal leadership candidate who helped found the Oil Sands Pathways Alliance, published a piece in the Globe this week calling for Canada to abandon its carbon capture and storage ambitions and redirect those billions into pipelines and export infrastructure. Her piece was not an exercise in climate denial, it was an argument about opportunity cost. Canada has limited capital, she wrote, and this is not the moment to spend it on projects with negligible global impact when the world is clamouring for what we actually have.
But this speed disconnect is only part of the story. Another concern, which this week also illuminated, is not just about the pace of government, it is about its method.
Honda’s $15-billion EV complex in Alliston, Ontario, moved this week from a temporary pause to what looks increasingly like an indefinite halt. The project was announced in 2024 with great fanfare by Justin Trudeau and Doug Ford, billed as the largest single private-sector investment in Ontario history, and underpinned by billions in government subsidies. The government had picked its winner. The winner has changed its mind.
This is what picking winners looks like at scale. The Honda collapse is not an isolated data point; the entire EV supply chain strategy proudly assembled under the Trudeau government rested on a set of assumptions about market direction that have since been proven wrong, at significant cost to the public. But the problem was not just the assumptions; it was the model: highly centralized, heavily subsidized, driven from the top down, with the federal government effectively deciding which industries and companies would define Canada’s economic future.
That concern was echoed at the PPF dinner from an unlikely source. John Knubley, a former deputy minister at ISED and one of the evening’s honorees, used his acceptance speech to deliver a pointed warning. He had spent three decades in the public service believing he had the answers, he said, something he now saw as “intolerable.” Then he looked at what was happening in Ottawa today and said he was worried about the top-down policymaking happening in the Ottawa bubble. It was a striking thing to say at a gala celebrating the public service.
To date, the Carney government’s industrial strategy has copied the same basic architecture as Trudeau’s: Ottawa identifies priorities, deploys capital to shape outcomes, then measures success by the number of announcements. The risk is that what looks like a win in 2024 looks like a huge liability by 2026.
Which brings us to Friday. After a week of industry complaints, pressure from Alberta, and a global energy market screaming for Canadian supply, the Carney government released two discussion papers proposing changes to the federal regulatory framework, including one genuinely significant idea: letting cabinet green-light major projects before technical assessments are completed, with expert review running in parallel rather than sequentially. That is the structural change industry has been begging for, and it deserves acknowledgment. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce welcomed it, while carefully noting that investor confidence remains elusive.
One of the deep sources of the disconnect between government and industry is that under Justin Trudeau, “never” had effectively become the default timeline for major projects in Canadian bureaucratic culture. Once you internalize the assumption that nothing will ever get built, any motion at all looks like progress. And once you’ve decided that picking winners is what governments do, every funding announcement feels like success.
The gap between Ottawa’s clock and the world’s clock is not new. What is new is the unacceptable cost of failing to close it, which the Carney government seems to be finally getting its head around. What remains is the growing evidence that a faster version of the same approach will almost certainly just make things worse.
— Andrew Potter
This week in Building Canada
May 9: Folk musician Gordon Lightfoot was bon on this day in 1938.
May 12: On this day in 1870, the Manitoba Act created Canada's fifth province, the first step in governing the vast territory known as Rupert’s Land transferred from the Hudson's Bay Company.
May 13. Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station, returned to Earth on this day in 2013 after five months in space.
May 14: On this day in 1946, Parliament passed the Canadian Citizenship Act, establishing for the first time that Canadians were citizens of Canada first — not British subjects who happened to live here. It was a quiet but decisive act of nation-building.
May 15: On this day in 1919, the Winnipeg General Strike began, the largest strike in Canadian history.
New Memo: Reward Risk and Reinvestment
Last week we sent the Standing Committee on Finance a pre-budget submission with two tax reforms we think could meaningfully shift Canada’s productivity trajectory:
A serious overhaul of the LCGE to keep founders building here instead of reincorporating in Delaware
And adopt a distributed profits taxation that would stop punishing the companies actually reinvesting in themselves.
Check it out here on our recently revamped website.
Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960)
Paul-Émile Borduas was born in Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, the son of a carpenter, and trained as a church decorator under Ozias Leduc before studying in Paris in the early 1930s. He returned to teach at the École du meuble in Montreal — a respectable, if modest, career trajectory. Then, in 1948, he blew it up.
That year, Borduas co-authored Refus global, one of the most incendiary documents in Canadian cultural history. Signed by fifteen artists and intellectuals, it was a full-spectrum rejection of the Catholic Church’s grip on Quebec society — its conservatism, its authoritarianism, its stranglehold on culture and conscience. The manifesto cost Borduas his teaching position almost immediately. He spent the rest of his life in relative poverty, moving first to New York and then to Paris, where he died.
What makes Borduas more than a martyr to a cause is the paintings. As founder of Les Automatistes, he developed a practice rooted in surrealist automatism — spontaneous, gestural works in which pure creative instinct bypasses rational control. Leeward of the Island (1947), swirling and dreamlike, captures the movement at its most charged. His late masterpiece 3 + 4 + 1 (1956, above) is a spare arrangement of black and white, and shows how far he had travelled toward something harder and more classical.
Refus global helped crack open modern Quebec. The church has faded in importance, but his paintings remain as urgent and relevant as ever.
Events
The Case for a United Canada
We’ve hit capacity for Monday’s The Case for a United Canada. 🇨🇦
We look forward to joining Hon. Jason Kenney, MP Corey Hogan, and an audience of over 500 of you at the University of Calgary for an honest discussion moderated by Jen Gerson on what it will require to build a stronger nation.
Didn’t grab tickets in time? You can still tune into the event at 6pm MT on our X and YouTube.
Build Canada CEO Lucy Hargreaves was on a panel at the Canada Strong and Free conference in Ottawa this week, discussing the question: after a decade of decline, delay, and deferral, how do we get back to building? The conversation drew on government, industry, builder, and labour expertise to lay out the foundations any serious builder economy requires.
What else we’ve been reading
Mark Carney says his government is getting ready to deal with 24 Sussex. And after years of delay and political interference, they finally broke ground on the Afghanistan war memorial in Ottawa.
Summer job? What summer job? The job market for youth is looking worse and worse.
The proposed design for the new House of Commons will feature a mix of desks for the front-benchers and benches with tray tables for those in the back.
According to a new poll from Nanos, support for Canada spending 2 per cent of GDP or higher on national defence continues to climb. And Phil Lagasse has a long but useful analysis of the Defence Investment Act on his substack.
Finally, this may be too Canadian even for us: The Tragically Hip have joined forces with Kawartha Dairy to bring you The Tragically Chip, an ice cream that is “maple whisky flavoured, with dark chocolatey chunks and a black cherry ripple, made right in Bobcaygeon, and a portion of proceeds supports @BreakfastCanada.”
Get weekly, no-fluff insights on building a more prosperous Canada. Tap “Subscribe” now and be first in line for next week’s brief. Then forward this email to one friend who cares as much as you do—let’s build together.
On the transition to a faster approval process: I understand the impatience, but I think it is often unrealistic. Some commentators seem to believe we can turn a complex ship of state 90 degrees like it's a go-kart. I'd rather miss an opportunity than do irreparable damage to our country or planet.
We can't, as some would have it, simply eliminate the regulatory process -- one that includes thorough applications and expert review. What we can do is work to eliminate redundancy and, if the political will is there, accept some larger risks for a time. We'll see how long that lasts.
We are, hopefully, not going to reduce ourselves to the standard of Russia, Iran, or Iraq. What an idea.
Australia might be a better competitive example, but we have to, as our PM likes to say, "take the world as it is," Or, my preferred version of the same obvious thought: start from where we're at. It took Australia a couple of decades of sustained effort to reach the point where they could move at speed. And even then, they have some of the same problems as Canada. Victoria is a bit like BC or Quebec: it doesn't share the same enthusiasm as the oil-and-gas-rich states, which creates friction and slows things down. Still, perhaps we can learn from them.
In the end, it's not as though most Canadians have stopped believing we need to preserve the planet for future generations. We can only turn this ship as fast as the key players and systems can adapt.
Living in Ottawa, the idea that our federal government can do big things well and has the intelligence to spend our money productively still resonates with a lot of people, mostly because their livelihoods depend on believing it. But outside of the 613 bubble, Reagan's comments about the nine scariest words in the English language ("I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help") are the reality most people are seeing.