The following op-ed, by ICBA President and CEO Chris Gardner, first appeared in the Journal of Commerce on September 15, 2026.
Canada has no shortage of things to build. ICBA Economics tracks more than $650 billion in major projects across British Columbia and Alberta alone: housing, pipelines, mines, ports, power lines, LNG plants, hospitals, water and sewer lines. Far too many sit in the “proposed” pile, waiting for a permit, a review or financing that never comes.
The waiting is the problem. Prime Minister Mark Carney started his mandate last year expressing a clear imperative to move faster, yet major projects can sit more than five years before the federal government makes a decision. A new mine can take 15 years to approve and open. The Port of Vancouver, a federal agency, has spent almost 15 years trying to add container capacity at a single terminal. Meanwhile, the sense of urgency continues to escalate as U.S. tariffs keep coming and traditional global trading alliances shift.
The Prime Minister has said Canada faces a war-like situation. He’s right. But a country at war doesn’t take 15 years to approve a mine, or half a decade to get a pipeline moving. If Canada is going to up its game, it has to build faster, cheaper and smarter.
Faster means a federal decision in under a year for every major project, not just those labelled in the “national interest.” Bill C-5 fast-tracks a select few and leaves all the others stuck in line. When elected officials start picking winners, there is always a lot more lost than won. Markets, investors, entrepreneurs will always recognize opportunity sooner and move faster than any government department or agency.
How governments should respond is no secret and has been well-documented: set hard deadlines for assessment, give project proponents dates that decisions will be issued, stop the overlap between Ottawa and the provinces, and apply the same rules to all projects. Ottawa's own discussion paper this spring laid most of this out. Put that plan into action now.
And none of this matters if the materials we need are sitting on a ship outside a closed port. Since 2024, the federal labour minister has stepped in nine times to end shutdowns at rail yards and ports. Over 16 months in 2023-24, West Coast port closures cost 24 days and disrupted $19.2 billion in cargo. When Vancouver and Prince Rupert stop moving steel, glass and electrical parts, projects stop too. Another round of port bargaining starts this fall. A province-wide bargaining unit, a special mediator and a standing arbitration authority for critical sectors would give Canada a predictable system instead of a yearly crisis, without taking away the right to strike.
Cheaper starts with housing. Residential construction costs are up 70 per cent since 2019, against 25 per cent inflation across the economy. Constant building and electrical code changes are a big part of that. Australia and California have paused code updates to protect affordable supply. Canada should too, through 2030. Development charges are now among the largest single costs in a new home, and cities collect them up front, when a builder’s cash is tightest. Federal housing money should go to cities that cut those charges or collect them at occupancy. Where cities are under pressure – maintaining existing power, water and sewer lines and building new ones – provincial and the federal governments need to help find ways to finance these projects.
Cheaper also means fixing demand. Housing starts in the Vancouver area fell 42 per cent year over year in July. B.C. recorded 124 presales in the first quarter of this year, against roughly 6,000 in the same quarter of 2021. The federal GST rebate on new homes reaches only first-time buyers, about 4.8 per cent of completions. Extend it to every buyer of a new home under $1.5 million. And when the foreign buyer ban expires in January, replace it with the Australian model: keep foreign buyers out of existing homes and let them finance the construction of new ones.
Smarter means a tax system built for this century. Canada ranks 22nd of 38 OECD countries on corporate tax competitiveness. A stunning report issued last year by the C.D. Howe Institute revealed that for every dollar per worker an American business invests in machinery and equipment, a Canadian company invests just 32 cents. That isn’t a Trump tariff story; it started long before. Tax reform is long overdue – it’s been a generation since there was a comprehensive review of the tax code. It’s hard to compete globally and attract investment in 2026, when the rules governing investment and capital flow were written in the 1980s.
And businesses have almost become numb to the red tape they battle every day. Federal rules now number almost 150,000, and CFIB says the average small business spends more than 250 hours a year on red tape that could cut without hurting health or safety. Reduce that burden to 25 hours.
Smarter also means training the people who will do the work. Ottawa has committed real money to the construction workforce, but a $331-million training-infrastructure fund flows only through union channels. In B.C., 85 per cent of construction workers aren’t in a building-trades union. In Alberta, it’s 88 per cent. Funding that skips most of the workforce won’t build much. Extend it to open-shop contractors, private trainers and the colleges that already do most of this work. No one preparing to address the historic infrastructure deficit facing our country would start by saying, “let’s deploy just 15 per cent of the people who are ready to build.”
Canada has the capital, the resources and the talent to build. What it lacks is a system that moves at the speed this moment demands. This fall’s budget is the federal government’s chance to take up this generational challenge.