Canada’s much-ballyhooed ‘build-it-quick’ plan is akin to giving the upstairs bedrooms a fresh coat of paint while rain continues pouring through your leaky roof.Sure, you can delude yourself those rooms really could do with a sprucing up, but it won’t take long until home-renovation reality bites, leaving you looking sadly skyward, while wondering why you even bothered in the first place.Welcome to Mark Carney’s would-be brave new world, one in which our almost-new prime minister plans on making Canada great again, though he’d never use that particular turn of phrase in a month of Sundays..Let’s give the Liberal leader the benefit of the doubt and accept his motives in attempting to reverse the drip-by-drip decline of our country’s industrial and economic fortunes are sincere, and not more Grit sleight-of-hand. (Yes, that requires a huge leap of faith from most Albertans.)So isn’t this Bill C-5 that Carney introduced in the Commons last week, the one that promises to fast track vital national infrastructure projects while deep-sixing interprovincial trade barriers, just what’s needed to course-correct a country rapidly sliding down the global economic league?Certainly the rhetoric suggests so, both from the prime minister and the assorted premiers, following their recent gung-ho gabfest in Saskatoon.But walking that talk is a whole different matter and it doesn’t take long, after perusing the bill’s details, to realize this is simply hope overriding bitter experience..For example, the bill explicitly states any change in the dreary status quo must not affect the standing of indigenous peoples and must equally uphold rigorous environmental standards.Now some latter day Rip van Winkle, just awakened after 20 years of slumber, might think such legal guarantees are both fair and reasonable. Hey, why would we deliberately pollute this country or denigrate Natives, people who’ve endured their fair share of past abuse?Ah, but as most Albertans know only too well, those two joined-at-the-hip legislative qualifications ensure a legal quagmire awaits any future project that can be subsequently hijacked by either the indigenous reparation and victimhood movement, or those valiant ‘Earth is Burning’ stalwarts..In either case, the overall goal will be to delay, derail and ultimately destroy any proposed project that remotely touches upon those groups’ easily triggered moral indignation. (Occasionally a suitable shakedown for enough cash can overcome those objections. But by the time Ottawa cuts those copious cheques most serious businesses involved have fled, pledging never to get fooled again.)But there’s a yet bigger hurdle facing Bill C-5, one as old as Canada itself. It is close to insurmountable.This is a confederated country, in which the individual provinces enjoy substantial powers. Given the sheer size of Canada with its vast geological differences this is close to unavoidable.The only other way a central government could call the shots across such a vast land would be in a dictatorship and despite the efforts of those Laurentian elites that hasn’t happened yet..Carney acknowledges no province would be forced to comply with any of the proposed projects in this drive to make Canada the top-performing economy amongst the G7 countries.So, we’re already hearing rumblings from Quebec and BC that any push to build new oil pipelines through their territory — Alberta’s main hope in this Team Canada approach — is dead on arrival.Well that’s that, then. This coming together of the provinces and the federal government to collaborate on future projects will fall apart as soon as those projects threaten to cross a provincial border. And that’s only assuming the indigenous and environmental lobbies haven’t already stuck a fork in the doomed duck..Instead Carney should be fixing that leaky roof, one that has turned the country into an economic carthorse, where the only way to get a smidgen of GDP growth is to embrace massive immigration, which in turn increases the pressure on health care, housing and education.We don’t need new laws: we need to scrap the bad ones holding us back.Repeal the cap on energy emissions, ditch Bill C-69, the so-called 'No new Pipelines Act,' get rid of the west coast tanker ban and rethink the onerous electricity production strictures. That’ll do for a start.Fix what is broken in Canada. Stop painting over the rot.
