Liberal Leader Mark Carney and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre are offering similar sounding energy development plans that would fast-track regulatory processes and create energy corridors to develop natural resource projects.
But some industry analysts and observers, while applauding the directions that both leaders are taking, are cautioning that their proposals may face significant challenges.
“It’s great to see that improving regulatory systems for major projects is on the agenda, but both approaches … raised some pretty big questions for me about how that would actually work in practice,” said Monica Gattinger, chair of the University of Ottawa’s positive energy program.
Both Poilievre and Carney said their plans would help reduce reliance on the U.S, particularly in the wake of the tariffs imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
To that end, Carney said he wants to cut wait times for the approval processes for major resource projects from five years to two. Poilievre’s Conservatives have promised a one-year maximum for review times, with a target of six months.
Both leaders have also raised the issue of implementing some kind of energy corridor.
Carney has promised to create trade and energy corridors for various types of projects deemed to be in the national interest for transport, energy, critical minerals and digital connectivity.
Meanwhile, Poilievre announced the creation of a “‘Canada First’ National Energy Corridor” that would “fast-track approvals for transmission lines, railways, pipelines, and other critical infrastructure across Canada in a pre-approved transport corridor entirely within Canada.”
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In the corridor, all levels of government would provide legally binding commitments to approve projects, according to the Conservatives.
Still, Gattinger said one of the first challenges for these policies will be defining exactly what a corridor is.
“I don’t think there’s a single definition of corridor, and we haven’t seen a lot of detail from either campaign about precisely what they mean by that concept,” Gattinger said.
Martha Hall Findlay, director of the University of Calgary’s school of public policy and a former Liberal MP, said both Carney and Poilievre are talking about the importance of Canadian energy to the economy.
“It’s not often you get the leaders of the two main parties actually saying similar things,” she said.
“They’re coming at it from a bit of a different perspective. They’re both saying, we get it, we need to build the infrastructure, we need to capitalize on the resources that we’re so blessed to have in this country [and] which we have not been capitalizing on for 20 years.”
Hall Findlay also said that their public policy school has studied the concept of a northern corridor for years and has come up with some important conclusions.
“One of the fundamental conclusions is [that] shortcuts make for lengthy delays. Two, it’s going to be hard.”
Katarina Koch, one of the researchers of that corridor project, said it’s important to note that a pre-approved corridor is not infrastructure development in itself but just a route that is being set aside for any potential future development.
“It’s not yet entirely clear what kind of infrastructure will be potentially built in this corridor,” she told CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener. “So this is really where a lot of the complexity and uncertainty comes from.”
The corridor could include different types of infrastructure — pipelines, road, railways — and they all come with their own regulatory requirements, Koch said.
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“The community might be open for one type of infrastructure but maybe not for another type of infrastructure,” Koch said. “And then there are really some questions about how this approval process will look like.”
The process also involves dealing with landholder rights, protected areas and Indigenous communities, she added.
The Conservatives have said that First Nations will be involved from the outset, ensuring that economic benefits flow directly to them and that their approval is secured before any money is spent.
But shortly after Poilievre’s announcement, Grand Chief Savanna McGregor of the Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council criticized the proposal.
“How can there be consultation (to say nothing of accommodation and consent) if the corridor is ‘pre-approved’ before anyone has the blueprints for what infrastructure will be built and where?” she wrote in the Toronto Star.
Hall Findlay said one of the frustrations with Poilievre’s corridor plan is that he makes the idea seem easy to implement.
“And it’s not. And I think Mark Carney recognizes that it’s more complicated,” she said. “You can’t just say, ‘We’ll just do this and we’ll get permits and approvals.’ You have to take into consideration community interests, regional interests, Indigenous community interests.”
But with Carney, Hall Findlay said there’s still an uncertainty about what exactly he means by an “energy corridor”, and whether that includes oil pipelines.
She said the world needs Canadian oil, and should be increasing production.
“Am I looking to hear certain things from Mark Carney that are maybe a little more specific about not being coy about oil? Yes.”
Gattinger added that it’s not clear how Carney — by doubling down on the oil and gas emissions cap and on Bill C-69, the Impact Assessment Act (dubbed the “no more pipelines act” by some critics) — squares that with talk about improving the investment environment to get more projects built.
“We’ve in effect got the same investment environment we have had over the last number of years,” she said. “How does that change things for the attractiveness of Canada as a place to do business?”
But on the Conservative side, Gattinger said if they swing too far toward pre-approving projects, they might begin to lose public support.
Gattinger also said both leaders are too focused on timelines and how to improve regulatory systems to get projects built faster.
“That’s an important objective, but a lot of the weaknesses in Canada’s investment environment have been issues over and above time, like the predictability of our policy framework,” she said.
One such example, Gattinger said, is the uncertainty over whether Canada will have an industrial carbon price or an oil and gas emissions cap.
“If you’re an investor, you can’t calculate the economics. of a project easily when you’ve got this unpredictability.”
