Can Canada Restore a Functional Regulatory Process for Major Infrastructure Projects? /

Other than the approvals related to the Canadian sections of the Keystone system, the Canadian regulatory approval process failed to meet those expectations. [...] Projects of the scale that emerged in this period in almost all cases required the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with the expected regulatory rigour of a “complete application”; that is, sufficiently detailed and fulsome to ultimately establish the specific necessary operating and construction conditions for the project to proceed. [...] Cycle times for regulatory approval have run on the order of four years.8 The election of Donald Trump has clearly restored the possibility that the project that always held the greatest value to Canada — Keystone XL — may actually proceed in 2017. [...] This phase would consolidate all other elements of federal and provincial environmental assessment in respect to the project; • Significantly, the second-phase deliberations would be in the context of a project that had already been determined to be in the public interest. [...] This process would have forced governments to have resolved this issue early and explicitly, at least with respect to the infrastructure; • Again, in the case of virtually all major pipelines filed since 2009, the other great uncertainty on any approval remains the inevitable litigation based on whether the applicant provided adequate stakeholder consultation and accommodation, particularly in res