Ron Wallace is a retired member of the National Energy BoardThe Carney government, faced with ever-more pressing geopolitical, energy security and economic concerns, has tasked the Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson to honour the prime minister's pledge to make Canada “an energy superpower.” Regrettably, he faces predictions from The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that Canada’s economy will grow by a dismal one per cent in 2025 and 1.1% in 2026 — this, at a time when the global economy is predicted to grow by 2.9%. As a proposed solution to these challenges the federal government has tabled legislation. (Bill C-5: An Act to enact the Free Trade and Labour Mobility Act and the Building Canada Act - the One Canadian Economy Act.) .It's a strange choice. The Carney government could have replaced controversial, and challenged, legislation such as the Impact Assessment Act.Instead, the Carney government proposes to add yet more legislation designed to accelerate and streamline regulatory approvals for energy and infrastructure projects in which Bill C-5 is to be superimposed over an already crippling regulatory base — for which only those projects that Ottawa designates as being in the national interest would be considered.The irony is that this legislation, which is being fast-tracked through the House, effectively admits that the raft of acts and regulations enacted under the Trudeau government constitute material barriers to development..But, instead of repealing, or substantially amending that legislation, Bill C-5 proposes giving Cabinet the power to suspend the IAA and several other key Acts in order to speed development applications and permits.That is, instead of doing the heavy lifting in Parliament needed to repeal or modify the burdensome legislative mandates enacted over the past decade, Carney’s remarkable approach instead chooses to circumvent that legislative base with the arbitrary suspensions of selected laws. Carney, the international champion of Net Zero, chooses not to repeal or amend those laws but instead proposes to arbitrarily, and selectively circumvent them while leaving billions in designated funding for Net Zero programs in place. (Table 1)..While this approach may avoid the lengthy delays that would accompany legislative change it allows the government to overlook, if not maintain, an onerous Canadian regulatory burden. But will Bill C-5 even work to accelerate Canadian energy project approvals?.The recent experience of TC Energy’s 670-kilometre Canadian Coastal GasLink project is compelling. Approved in 2018, it took five years to complete at a cost of $14.4 billion, twice the original estimate. Meanwhile, TC Energy completed their 715 km Southeast Gateway natural gas pipeline in Mexico, built to supply gas-fired power plants, in under three years and 13% below budget.A recent commentary by Robert Lyman demonstrates the fallacies with the government’s approach under Bill C-5:“Even if the eventual passage of the Building Canada Act takes a few months off the time required to take a new pipeline project from concept to completion and operation, the actual results, in terms of useful and operating infrastructure, are still many years away. This assumes that a project sponsor would be willing to risk more than a billion dollars in the hope that its project can survive the entire process. So, what’s the rush to ram this bill through Parliament in five days without proper debate?”.Recall that there remain long-simmering federal-provincial tensions rooted in jurisdictional disputes over the Impact Assessment Act (IAA) (or Bill C-69) which the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) ruled as having parts that constituted an unconstitutional “impermissible intrusion“ — a federal overreach into provincial jurisdiction. That same year, the Federal Court overturned Canada’s ban on single-use plastics having deemed that policy to be “unreasonable and unconstitutional”.Subsequently, federal Clean Electricity Regulations (published in November 2024) have been strongly opposed by Alberta, arguing that Canada’s constitution under Section 92A grants exclusive jurisdiction to Alberta for the generation and production of electrical energy. On April 30, 2025 Alberta filed a reference case with the Alberta Court of Appeal that challenged the constitutionality of those Regulations.Meanwhile, in addition to their funding commitments to Net Zero programs, the federal government continues to ignore public scepticism, if not hostility, to programs like unrealistically mandated EV automotive sales quotas. Apparently ignoring estimates that these increasingly unpopular bans on gas-powered vehicles could cost upwards of $300 billion, Environment Minister Dabrusin appears to have doubled down on the Trudeau government’s former EV mandate.These are remarkable contradictions in policies. The federal government is proposing to spur stagnant Canadian economic growth by accelerating selected energy projects that it deems to be “in the national interest” by circumventing existing cumbersome, unamended legislation. It does so, even as it maintains material prior commitments to Net Zero programs.Will the federal government be able to spur the Canadian economy on, while simultaneously doubling down on commitments for “responsibly produced oil and gas” as it circumvents its own legislation and proposes a Canadian emissions cap, maintains the West coast tanker ban and imposes a clean electricity mandate? The proof, as they say, will be in the ‘economic pudding’.Ron Wallace is a retired member of the National Energy Board.
