COLUMN: Reflecting on the One Canadian Economy Act

COLUMN: Reflecting on the One Canadian Economy Act

Published 9:59 am Friday, September 25, 2026

It was just over one year ago that the recently elected Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney introduced Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act.

It was an omnibus bill where one part of the bill promised to “dismantle Canada’s internal trade barriers.”

The second part of the bill promised to “empower federal cabinet to designate major ‘national interest’ projects and fast-track them by bypassing specific federal regulatory roadblocks.”

As Carney explained it at the time, this was all part of “Canada’s new government has a mandate to build big, build bold and build now.”

Fast forward one year, and, as many well know, Canada’s internal trade barriers remain in effect. Likewise, the only projects currently underway were pre-existing projects that existed prior to Bill C-5. In fact, not one single new project has been created in the past year that has shovels in the ground today.

I mention this because this prime minister promised to “build at speeds not seen in generations.” Yet just over a year later, the government is back with another bill promising to solve many of the same problems.

Bill C-39, “the Building Canada Strong Act,” is similar to Bill C-5 in that it is also an omnibus bill that proposes changes in very different areas that could be dealt with separately in two different bills.

The Liberals also make a similar argument for Bill C-39, suggesting “this legislation will give our country the tools we need to build more, better and more.”

We are starting to see a pattern here where Liberals promise to build things at speeds not seen in generations, only to fail and bring in new omnibus bills that will apparently clear the way for progress going forward until it doesn’t.

What is always interesting with a bill is when you read the backgrounder. In this case, buried quite deeply is a curious statement from the Liberals:

“The Canada Energy Regulator (CER) will conduct the assessment under the Canada Energy Regulator Act, rather than through an integrated review panel with the Impact Assessment Agency. Since the introduction of the integrated review panel process in 2019, no project has met the threshold to be assessed by a panel.”

This is a fascinating admission by the Liberal government. In its own communications, the government concedes that since the integrated review panel process was introduced in 2019, not one project has met the threshold to be assessed by a panel.

Think about that. The Liberal government created this regulatory process in 2019. Seven years later, the same Liberal government is now telling Canadians that not one project has met the threshold to be assessed through it. Now it is introducing another omnibus bill to change the system it created.

This raises a very obvious question. At a time when Canada was struggling to grow our economy and the Liberal government was spending billions of dollars to select industries to stimulate economic growth, how did a major regulatory pathway created by this government operate for seven years without a single project even reaching the threshold to be assessed through it?

And why did it take seven years for the government to acknowledge that the process needed to change?

That is seven years of very expensive stagnation. What the Liberals do not tell you is that it was their own government that created this process in 2019, promising at the time that it would work. Seven years later, their own admission tells us otherwise.

Governments sometimes get things wrong. The real test of accountability is whether those failures are exposed, debated and ultimately corrected. That requires an effective opposition, but it also requires a media that is willing to scrutinize governments closely.

Few, if any, media organizations will point this out. I am pointing this out not only as a member of the Official Opposition, but because governments must be held accountable. If citizens are unaware of the mistakes that are made by government, they cannot demand transparency and accountability.

I can say from my time on the government side of the House that relentless media scrutiny of the government is a good thing, as it helps keep governments accountable.

Increasingly, I see this government evading accountability, in large part because many media organizations do not hold it to the same standards as previous governments.

Dan Albas is the Conservative MP for the riding of Okanagan Lake West-South Kelowna.