Rob Breakenridge: Mark Carney’s pipeline campaign against … Trudeau

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to media in Fort McMurray, Alta., announcing that the Pacific Link pipeline has been listed as a project of national interest, on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. Photo by Itoro Umanah /Postmedia

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CALGARY — It’s not a finish line, and it’s been a longer and more complicated process getting to this point than should have been the case, but Thursday’s pipeline announcement is a major milestone, nonetheless.

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The declaration that the new west coast pipeline — now known as Pacific Link — is a project of national interest marks not only a big step forward for this vital project, but also a further and significant break from the Trudeau legacy.

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Justin Trudeau’s name was absent from Thursday’s press conference, but his policies and his record were, for all intents and purposes, thrown under the bus numerous times — not just by Alberta’s premier, but also by Trudeau’s own successor.

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But, frankly, if we are to meet the ambition of Mark Carney’s rhetoric and build at the “scale and speed” the prime minister now deems necessary, then the more we can shred that legacy, the better.

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There’s a political shrewdness in Carney’s recognition of the need to dismantle Trudeau’s signature policies and to defuse the political weapon that those policies created for the Conservatives. In fact, Carney’s pointed words Thursday morning in Fort McMurray were as harsh as any Conservative critique of the last few years.

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The prime minister lamented the fact that Canada has become “weighed down by well intentioned, but arduous, often duplicative, regulatory processes,” thus creating an urgency to “do things differently.”

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Carney also pointed to the heavy cloud of uncertainty that has deterred major investments. Canada “stopped building,” he said, due to project proponents having to “spend years and potentially billions of dollars doing this work before even knowing where the federal government stood.”

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The result, Carney says, was that “for many builders, the risk was not worth it.”

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It would be difficult to disagree with that assessment. The extent to which this is no longer the case, however, remains to be seen.

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It’s unfortunate that we needed a major projects office or the creation of a special lane for those projects deemed to be in the national interest. The excitement of Thursday’s announcement should certainly be tempered by that recognition.

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The new Bill C-39 — the Building Canada Strong Act — aims to streamline project approvals more broadly and negate the need for these special designations. That’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go.

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In the meantime, though, the urgency remains in advancing this pipeline.

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All the points made Thursday — the economic benefits of the project, the sovereignty and diversification boost of greater access to foreign markets, the importance of Indigenous ownership and involvement, and the national unity upside of showing that Canada can work — are all true right now. Yet, even the best-case scenario here is another year before final approval and five more years after that before actual construction.