Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during a media availability on the sidelines of the the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the UN headquarters on Tuesday.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
This week, we saw Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government take a second swing at big, ostensibly game-changing economic legislation. This time, Mr. Carney actually went in to work on the plumbing.
In its first year, Mr. Carney’s government built a lot of workarounds and special powers that were supposed to cut through the thicket of bureaucracy. Now, it’s trying to clear away some of that underbrush.
A year ago, the Liberal government’s marquee economic bill was the One Canadian Economy Act, which promised to speed up major project approvals and break down internal barriers. The modus operandi was making fast tracks through the system to push priorities.
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In that bill, a list of big projects would be declared to be in the national interest and steered through the system by a new Major Projects Office. Ministers were given new powers to bend existing rules and even laws to speed up those major projects and accelerate transportation projects.
Now, the Liberal government is tabling a new bill to do many of the same things, but in a bigger, broader, more systematic way. And this time, it is actually trying to reform the system, rather than cut a path through it.
Take a peek past the title sheet of Bill C-39, the Build Canada Strong Act introduced this week, and you will see a dense package of 361 sections that reform project approvals, revamp transportation regulation to attract investment in ports and rail and create national trade corridors, and reduce strikes in transportation choke points like ports.
In all, the omnibus bill is set to amend 18 pieces of legislation and repeal another.
It represents a new level of legislative ambition, one that goes beyond a short-term rush to bully the system into accomplishing a set of priorities to re-engineering the system. It is, as Mr. Carney said during a news conference at the United Nations, intended to clear out layer upon layer of well-meaning rules and restrictions, “duplication, parallel processes, enormous cost.” That’s an important effort. But it’s full of mundane details and prone to resistance.
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A big question now is whether Mr. Carney is willing to go into the plumbing on his other priorities. The modus operandi of his first year and a half in power had been building workarounds and superstructures to cut through the system, including a Defence Investment Agency and Build Canada Homes.
In the case of Bill C-39, the new legislative ambition is being marshalled in the service of Mr. Carney’s highest priority, his effort to attract investment.
On one level, it has to be seen as an implicit recognition that the first approach wasn’t enough to get the job done. Last year’s Bill C-5 included a part called the Building Canada Act. This week’s Bill C-39 includes a part called Build Canada Now.
Perhaps that’s happening now because Mr. Carney has a solid majority. Crucially, there is broad public support for measures to build the domestic economy in the midst of a trade war with Donald Trump’s United States – and Liberal cabinet ministers cited this as a response to nearly every question about the bill.
Still, actually reforming the system tends to raise resistance. Bill C-39 already has.
In particular, the new bill contains a set of provisions aimed at normalizing the use of ministerial power to order the settlement of labour disputes.
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The labour minister already had a broad legal power to do that, which was rarely used before 2024, when the government started using it regularly to halt labour disputes at airlines, ports and railways. But that section of the law was facing challenges in the courts as being unconstitutionally broad and the new bill sets out guidelines that might protect it from such challenges.
It’s a bid to prevent labour disputes that can cause serious economic disruption in a big country with east-west transportation routes and few major ports. The 2024 Vancouver port lockout stranded billions of dollars’ worth of exports inland.
But there’s no doubt it would handcuff the ability of workers in those industries to strike – and has already riled unions.
Mr. Carney has enough public backing to handle the politics of that right now, and the complaints that his new process will water down environmental reviews.
He has enough political leeway to rewire government into other areas, in housing, in tax reform and so on. With Bill C-39, at least, he has signalled a desire to start fixing the plumbing.