FLETCHER: B.C. blunders ahead on its ‘build, baby build’ plan

Victoria-based Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984The federal Liberal government has become known for borrowing dubious ideas from B.C. Under Prime Minister Mark Carney, that trend seems likely to continue .There was of course the carbon tax, which started out as a revenue-neutral incentive and ended up as a government revenue generator that Justin Trudeau insisted was making most people better off. There was the decriminalization of hard drugs, abandoned as its predictable failure became too obvious to ignore.Now there’s “build, baby build,” promised by Mr. Carney as part of his pitch to respond to the threats emanating from U.S. President Donald Trump. It’s difficult to say right now what that will really mean, but it looks like an effort to force more housing construction, and somehow cut down the decade-plus approval process for mines and other major infrastructure..Apparently that’s major infrastructure that doesn’t include an east-west pipeline to replace foreign oil with product from Western Canada. Asked about that possibility during the leaders' debate, after he had hinted at using emergency powers, Carney essentially said that the way to get east-west pipelines built is to do whatever Quebec wants to do. So forget that.On housing, it’s first necessary to understand the size of Canada’s problem. Casey Edge, executive director of the Victoria Residential Builders Association, summed it up at a recent energy development forum in the city. Edge noted that in 1976, Canada’s population was about 23 million, and there were 273,000 housing starts. In 2024, the population had grown to 41 million, and there were only 245,000 housing starts. To keep up with the people who are joining the workforce each year, Canada needs to double its housing construction..Housing is restricted by three levels of government, which dictate what to build, where, with how many energy rules and extra fees for utilities and amenities.B.C. set an interventionist course in 2023. It imposed a law requiring municipalities to allow up to four units to be built on single-family or duplex lots, and six units on larger lots near transit. After surviving the fall election, the next step was a set of new housing targets assigned to 30 municipalities to meet in the current high-fee, labour-short construction market.Ontario was actually first out of the gate with a less aggressive plan, mandating duplex or triplex construction on single-family lots without rezoning..Carney has focused on launching a huge new Crown housing corporation. He’s not yet steamrolling local and provincial governments, or tying infrastructure money to increased housing as Pierre Poilievre aimed to do. Among its crises of bad policy, the Liberal government is still struggling with another idea it copied from B.C., nationalized child care at $10/day.This week, B.C. Premier David Eby built on his concentration of executive power with something called the Infrastructure Projects Act. This legislation gives the cabinet authority to designate major projects for a new approval process, that goes around environmental assessment and local government. Housing and even schools and hospitals can be held up by all those local Official Community Plans, so it’s time to do to them what they’ve done to zoning.Just as Ottawa has too many ministries and overlapping programs (more than 100 for skills training alone!) B.C. has excelled at over-managing permits. In addition to the environment ministry, Eby’s government has a ministry of water, land and resource stewardship, an energy ministry now tasked with climate change, and a stand-alone mines ministry that hopes to bring the approval process for new mines down below 15 years..Now it is creating a path to direct pet projects around all that bureaucracy, and somehow speed up indigenous consultation as well.The first target is not another gas pipeline (those are left out of the Infrastructure Projects Act,) but nine new wind power projects that are to be fast-tracked. These things are often built in rugged mountain terrain, with haul roads for enormous components, hundreds of tonnes of concrete and steel, and power lines across untracked land.I can hardly wait.Tom Fletcher grew up in the Peace River region and has covered B.C. politics and business as a journalist since 1984.tomfletcherbc@gmail.com X:@tomfletcherbc

FLETCHER: B.C. blunders ahead on its ‘build, baby build’ plan

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