“Our economy is suffering, and not just from the uncertainty caused by the missives from the White House, but by a lack of productivity improvement and investment generally.”

While the expression you see in the title is old hat, the content as it applies to Canada has a new twist. Ottawa’s new legislation, Bill C5, is designed to fast track major projects across the country. In actual fact, we have a much bigger problem than this Bill might help correct.

A senior cabinet minister in the current government bemoaned to me not too many years ago that Canada needed to show the world (and Canadians) we could build big projects. Amen to that. The last big one, the Kinder Morgan-sponsored Trans Mountain pipeline had all its permits in place and won 18 successive court challenges before losing the 19th. The company, understandably, gave up on the project and went home to Texas. That legacy over-hangs the image of Canada in the world’s capital markets. And we need to change it—urgently!

At the time of this writing, and even perhaps at your reading, our future trading relationship with the U.S. is uncertain. I believe it is very likely going to continue to be that way for the foreseeable future.

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