When European governments were paying record premiums for liquefied natural gas in 2022 and 2023 — desperate to replace Russian supply after the invasion of Ukraine — Canada had essentially nothing to offer them. Not because the resource did not exist. Canada holds the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world and substantial natural gas deposits in British Columbia and Alberta. The problem was infrastructure. Canada had no LNG export terminals on its east coast and only one under construction on its west coast, years from completion. The result was that a close NATO ally sat out one of the most significant energy security crises its allies had faced in a generation, holding a hand it could not play.
LNG Canada in Kitimat represents the first large-scale LNG export facility in the country's history, and it took roughly a decade from approval to first export. Australia, which competes directly with Canada for LNG market share, has built multiple export terminals and become one of the world's largest LNG exporters in roughly the same timeframe. The gap is not geological. It is regulatory and political. Canada's environmental assessment and permitting processes for major infrastructure projects are among the most complex and time-consuming in the developed world. A 2022 report from the Business Council of Canada found that major resource projects in Canada face average regulatory timelines of twelve to fifteen years from initial application to construction approval — roughly three to four times longer than comparable Australian processes.
The critical minerals situation is similar in structure and more urgent in timeline. The global competition for lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earth elements is accelerating because these materials underpin electric vehicles, battery storage, semiconductor manufacturing, and defence systems. Canada ranks among the top countries globally in reserves of several of these materials. Yet Canada's share of global critical mineral production remains well below its reserve endowment, in part because the permitting process to bring a new mine from discovery to production can take fifteen years or more. Australia has moved to streamline approvals and develop domestic processing capacity. The minerals will be extracted globally regardless. The question is whether Canadian workers and the Canadian tax base capture that value or whether it goes elsewhere.
The pattern across both energy and minerals points to the same underlying problem: Canada possesses the strategic assets but consistently struggles to execute the large-scale infrastructure projects required to monetise them. The Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion took over a decade, required federal government purchase of the asset, and cost nearly four times its original estimate before completion. The Northern Gateway pipeline was cancelled after years of regulatory process. Energy East was abandoned. Each of these outcomes reflects a different combination of regulatory, legal, and political factors — but the cumulative signal to investors is consistent. Canada is a difficult place to build large things, and that difficulty is not primarily physical.
The geopolitical cost of this execution gap is not abstract. Allies seeking reliable energy partnerships, secure mineral supply chains, and stable long-term suppliers are making decisions now about who they build infrastructure with and who they sign long-term agreements with. Those decisions shape relationships and trade flows for decades. A Canada that cannot deliver LNG terminals on a competitive timeline, cannot permit mines within a reasonable window, and cannot complete pipeline infrastructure without decade-long political battles is a Canada that participates less in those conversations than its resource endowment would otherwise justify.
The argument is not that environmental assessment should be abandoned or that Indigenous consultation is optional — both serve legitimate purposes and the consequences of shortcutting either are well documented. The argument is that Canada's current framework for approving and building strategic infrastructure is not delivering results at a pace consistent with its geopolitical and economic interests, and that other countries with comparable governance standards have found ways to move faster. Closing that gap is not an ideological question. It is a state capacity question. And the answer requires treating large-scale infrastructure execution as a national priority rather than a series of individual regulatory problems to be managed in isolation.