Canada has ambitious environmental and economic targets. To meet these targets, Canada needs to invest $125-140 billion every year until 2050 to build an unprecedented amount of infrastructure. With our current regulatory systems, we won’t be able to achieve this goal.
Future Unbuilt contains pragmatic and actionable solutions to improve Canada’s regulatory systems today, and work toward a model system tomorrow—a system that enables us to meet our environmental targets and becomes part of our competitive advantage.
Background
The federal government has set ambitious targets for emissions reduction and a goal to be net zero by 2050. The reality is that to meet these targets, we need to build major infrastructure at a scale never before seen in Canadian history.
This will require record levels of investment in many areas including critical minerals; power generation and transmission; hydrogen manufacturing and export capacity; low carbon energy and small modular reactors.
Canadians support responsible and sustainable development. But our process to achieve that is complex, fractured, and frustrating. Canada is simply not seen as an attractive place to invest, and if we don’t improve our regulatory systems, our country will continue to lose out on important low or zero carbon initiatives, strategic investments, tens of thousands of jobs across the country, and opportunities to enable Indigenous partnerships.
Historically, we have set up our systems to stop bad things from happening. Now we need them to make good projects happen—and happen fast. We need pragmatic, balanced, and solution-focused ideas to improve the systems that can enable Canada to meet our climate ambitions and sustainably expand the economy.
About the Task Force on Major Project Development & Regulatory Excellence
The Task Force brings together regulatory and policy experts from across the country to examine Canada’s permitting and approvals processes, identify challenges, and offer both first steps to improve current systems and a vision for a model regulatory system in an effort to enable Canada to meet its environmental and economic targets.