Matt Gurney: Major Confession Office

The MPO is an admission of dysfunction. It only exists because the rest of the government’s regulatory apparatus is unfit for purpose.

By: Matt Gurney

The more I think about the Major Projects Office, the grumpier I get.

I’m certainly all aboard with the notion that there are projects in the national interest that we should be trying to get done in an accelerated way. To whatever extent the MPO is able to accomplish that, good. Let’s all blow it a big kiss. Plus, with news emerging of an apparently upcoming announcement of a pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific, you can also start to see the political utility of the MPO. That pipeline is going to be really hard to get built given geographic realities, legal realities, and the political opposition in British Columbia. But Prime Minister Mark Carney signing himself up with a pipeline to the Pacific is going to help him in a big way to dampen unrest in Alberta.

So like I said, I get it.

But are we not kind of glossing over the fact that it’s also a pretty damning indictment of this country? A country that is working correctly does not need a Major Projects Office. The MPO is a confession of dysfunction. It only exists because the rest of the government’s regulatory apparatus is unfit for purpose.

And, like, should we maybe spend more time thinking about that, and what the need for an MPO tells us (and the world) about Canada?

Earlier this week, I was at an event where I got to hear from some representatives of Canada’s energy sector. It was all Chatham House Rules so I won’t go into a lot of detail about what was said. But I will tell you that both the formal presentations and some of the conversations I was having on the sidelines all basically confirmed the fact that Canada is not a place a lot of companies are keen to invest in.

Why? Because we’re a bad bet. The certainty of delay and lack of certainty in eventual approval is so baked in that even Canadian companies are choosing to invest their available capital in other places where the chances of approval and eventual completion are greater. Often a lot greater.

Nothing in the above is controversial or really denied. Obviously there are still some projects that manage to get approved and even completed. As has been noted here before, it’s easier to get some of them done, for instance, if they’re contained entirely within a single province. And yes, I did see the announcement Thursday of a new EV battery facility in Ontario.

So don’t feel any big rush to provide counterexamples to what I’ve said above. The point isn’t that it is literally impossible to get anything at all built in Canada. The point is that it’s really, severely unnecessarily hard to do it.

And this is not a point that is even being contested by the government itself. That’s why we have an MPO.

I talk a lot with participants in Canada’s resources sector. Everything I’m saying above is widely echoed and recognized by anyone with any direct hands-on experience with getting projects from proposal to completion. Or even experience attempting to do that. And now I’m also hearing something else from them. They’re wondering what it’s going to mean for their company if they have a really great project that would be in the national interest and that would generate a lot of revenue and jobs and would enhance Canadian sovereignty and security, but doesn’t, for whatever reason, qualify as a major project.

Do they just give up on it because it’s not worth the effort of trying to ram it through the existing dysfunctional bureaucracy that the MPO is designed to bypass?

People I talk to in the resources sector are trying to figure out what to do. “What if we have a great project in a province that has already had a project referred to the MPO?” is a question I’ve heard versions of more than once. “Is it worth applying for, or are we going to find ourselves in a situation where there will be no other projects considered for that region until every province and region has one approved? Will any government want to have three projects underway in one province with only one, or none, approved in another? And who’s going to make that call? Will it be the prime minister, or the bureaucrats? Do I need better lobbyists?”

The MPO will probably solve some of our problems. But it’s also going to create other problems. It will induce as much uncertainty as it seeks to address.

And none of it actually solves the fundamental problem that we started with: we’re only talking about an MPO because we need one. And we only need one because we’re dysfunctional. And we’re dysfunctional because we choose to be. We did this to ourselves.

The best thing I can hope for from the MPO is that it ends up being a temporary expedient. Some kind of stopgap measure that allows us to ram some high-priority projects through on an accelerated basis so that we can take the time to do the harder work of actually asking ourselves how to fix the real problem. Paul Wells touched on this in a piece he wrote earlier in the week. If the Major Projects Office becomes a place where we start identifying problems that repeatedly come up during the MPO’s work, we could then use that as a target list of things that we need to go out and fix. In this scenario, the MPO will eventually cause its own obsolescence. As problems are identified and addressed, the need for the special process will gradually be eliminated. The normal process will work for all.

Would it be out of line for me to note that it does not neatly align with literally every single experience I have ever had with any level of governance during my entire life in this country? Bureaucracies become entrenched and then morph, gradually but inevitably, into a different kind of problem that someone will eventually design a new bureaucratic response to address. In 30 years, Matt Gurney Jr. will probably be wondering if the new Mega Projects Office is the best way to address the morass of delays and red tape that is the Major Projects Office.

And so on and so on.

I really want to believe that we’re going to make some progress. And I honestly do sincerely believe that the prime minister is genuinely aware of the problems of getting stuff done and attracting investment to Canada and is trying to solve them.

But the MPO can only ever possibly be a stopgap, a temporary way of bypassing a problem that we’re going to need more time to solve properly. And since we all apparently agree that it’s urgent, which is why we have the office in the first place, it would be good to see some urgency in not just getting the MPO running, but in making it obsolete.

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