Carney's "Nation-Building" Law: Nearly a Year In, Zero Projects Approved

The Carney government passed its flagship "nation-building" legislation to enormous fanfare — promising pipelines, ports, clean energy corridors, and national infrastructure the country hadn't seen since the transcontinental railway. MPs are now sounding the alarm: nearly a year after the law received royal assent, zero projects have been approved. The legislation exists. The slogans exist. The projects do not.

The Promise

Mark Carney ran on "nation-building." It was the centrepiece of his economic platform — a vision of Canada asserting sovereignty through infrastructure, reducing dependence on American markets, building the pipelines, ports, and energy corridors that resource exporters and workers have demanded for decades.

The political rhetoric was striking in its ambition. Carney invoked the transcontinental railway. He talked about projects that would bind the country together east to west, open new markets, and give Canada economic independence from the United States at a moment when the trade relationship with Washington had never been more uncertain.

Bill C-5 was the legislative vehicle. It passed with considerable momentum, supported with the argument that regulatory bottlenecks were the primary obstacle to nation-scale infrastructure. The law was designed to fast-track approvals — cut red tape, streamline environmental reviews, give the federal government tools to designate projects of national strategic importance and move them through the system quickly.

Canadians were told the shovels would follow the signatures.

The Reality

Conservative MP Aaron Gunn of North Island—Powell River raised the alarm this week: nearly a year after Bill C-5 received royal assent, not a single project has been approved under it. Zero. The law Carney passed to fast-track nation-building infrastructure has fast-tracked nothing.

The legislation sits on the books while the projects it was supposed to unlock remain in the same regulatory limbo they were in before. Minister Dominic LeBlanc has been associated with the file, but MPs are reporting that the approval machinery the bill was supposed to create has not produced a single actionable outcome.

This is not a minor footnote. The law's entire justification was speed — the argument that Canada was losing investment, losing workers, losing economic opportunity because approvals took too long. The solution: legislation to speed things up. The result: an unbroken record of zero approvals in the time since the law was passed.

A Pattern Canadians Have Seen Before

This is not the first time a Liberal government has passed legislation with sweeping infrastructure ambitions and delivered nothing.

The Trudeau government launched the Canada Infrastructure Bank in 2017 with $35 billion and a mandate to build transformational infrastructure using private capital. Years later, independent analyses showed the bank had spent more on its own operations than on finished projects. The projects it did touch were mostly small-scale, delayed, and far removed from the "transformational" framing of the original pitch.

Now Carney is running the same playbook. Pass the law. Hold the press conference. Announce the numbers. Then let the bureaucracy absorb the energy while nothing gets built.

Canada's business community has been screaming about this problem for years. Capital is fleeing. As Western Standard columnist Cory Morgan wrote this week: "With capital fleeing, productivity lagging, and GDP per capita falling, the Carney government's $25 billion investment scheme dodges the real problem: Canada has become hostile territory for business."

The nation-building law is another chapter in the same story. Announce big. Deliver nothing. Move on to the next announcement.

The "Canada Strong Fund" Is Also Borrowed Money

The nation-building failure connects directly to Carney's other signature economic policy: the $25 billion "Canada Strong Fund," announced April 27 as a kind of sovereign wealth vehicle to invest in energy, infrastructure, critical minerals, AI, and renewables.

The problem: Canada is running a $78.3-billion deficit. There is no surplus to fund a sovereign wealth fund. The $25 billion is borrowed. Real sovereign wealth funds — Norway's $1.7 trillion behemoth, Kuwait's, the UAE's — were built from surplus energy revenues. Canada's version is funded by adding to a $1.2-trillion debt pile.

So to recap: the law to build infrastructure has built nothing. The fund to invest in infrastructure is debt-financed. And the PM running both is still holding $10M+ in Brookfield — a company that operates in every sector the fund will invest in.

What Real Nation-Building Looks Like

Real nation-building requires more than legislation and press conferences. It requires sustained political will to override the regulatory and political obstacles that have blocked every major Canadian infrastructure project of the past decade.

Trans Mountain was completed — but it took the federal government buying the pipeline, absorbing billions in cost overruns, and fighting provincial and activist opposition for years. It was a success only in the narrow sense that it eventually got built. It was not a template. It was an exception.

Every proposed pipeline, every LNG terminal, every major transmission line in this country runs into the same wall: an approval process designed to delay rather than decide, and a political class in Ottawa that benefits more from announcing projects than from completing them.

Bill C-5 was supposed to change that. The verdict, after nearly a year: it has not changed anything. Zero projects. Zero shovels. One very expensive law that has so far produced nothing except a talking point for the next election campaign.

The Bottom Line

Canadians were promised a new era of national infrastructure — pipelines, ports, energy corridors, the kind of backbone investment that creates jobs, opens markets, and builds a country. Parliament passed a law. Carney held the press conferences. The business community waited.

Almost a year later: zero approved projects.

The Liberal government is running a $78.3-billion deficit. It is accumulating debt at a pace that should alarm every Canadian who believes their children deserve a country that isn't mortgaged before they're born. And the one law that was supposed to generate real economic activity — to build things, create jobs, produce revenue — has produced nothing.

MP Aaron Gunn isn't wrong to sound the alarm. The only question is whether anyone in Ottawa is listening.