The One Canadian Economy Act, which received Royal Assent on June 26, 2025, has two components to it: the Building Canada Act and the Free Trade and Labour Mobility in Canada Act. Today, I'd like to talk about the first one.
The intent of the act is to expedite the delivery of "nation-building projects." Projects that will strengthen Canada's autonomy, resilience, and security, and turn the country into a global superpower (my words, not theirs).
The government states that this might include things like highways, railways, ports, airports, oil pipelines, critical minerals, mines, nuclear facilities, and electricity transmission systems.
At a high level, the streamlining is intended to work like this:
Projects first need to qualify as a nation-building project.
Then, the federal government approves the project right from the outset.
Following this a single conditions document will be issued by a new Federal Major Projects Office. This is intended to replace the current process of multiple sets of comments, conditions, and federal permits.
Overall, the target is to reduce average approval timelines from ~5 years to ~2 years.
What I particularly like about this sequence is that projects get "approved" right at the start. This is intended to immediately change the conversation from whether we should build to how do we build, which is an important distinction.
As someone who manages projects for a living, I can tell you that decisive and clear direction is critical to moving projects forward. Uncertainty and indecision kill momentum and motivation within teams. You need to be able to say, "this project is going, and going fast, so focus on figuring it out and making it happen!"
Ultimately, everything comes down to execution. But at least we're taking positive steps toward becoming a country that once again builds — and builds big.
Management guru Clayton M. Christensen died this week. Sadly, he was only 67 (leukaemia). A professor at Harvard Business School, Christensen was best known for probably two things: His work on disruptive innovation and his teachings on how to live a more fulfilling life. If you've read anything on innovation and disruption, I am sure you've come across the work of Christensen. He had a way of explaining things by reframing them. Here is a short video about the "job" of a McDonald's milkshake. And here is another one where he explains the cycle of disruptive innovations, sustaining innovations, and efficiency innovations. Both videos are worth watching.
https://youtu.be/Zn6-KksdOgE?t=67
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a book that I read a number of years ago (Amazon just told me that I purchased it on March 12, 2014), but that I frequently come back to in my mind.
One of my favorite themes in the book can be summed up with this quote: “Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.”
Decisions can be scary. What if I make the wrong decision and things go horribly wrong? Then things are on me.
In some organizations, indecision may feel like the safest decision. Let’s do one more study just to make sure that we’ve got this right.
But in a startup (which is what Ben Horowitz’s book is about) and in organizations that would actually like to grow, innovate, and accomplish things, indecision can mean death. Without decisions, organizations lock up.
None of this is to say that bad decisions are okay. Executives must make high quality decisions as fast as possible, and as a rule of thumb you probably want to make more good decisions than bad decisions.
But speed, momentum, and organizational clarity also matter a great deal.
One of the reasons why I mentally come back to this book is because oftentimes I find that things can get hung up on relatively inconsequential decisions. So I like to remind myself that go is better than stop.
As Ben points out in his book: “The only mistake you cannot make is running out of cash.” And time has a funny way of burning through cash.