COMMENTARY: Canada Has Rediscovered Big Ambition – Can It Turn That Into Things That Actually Get Built? – Stewart Muir

Canada has rediscovered its appetite for big ambition. Now comes the harder work of turning capital, customers and political intent into things that actually get built.

By Stewart Muir

Last Monday morning, while Toronto’s first Canada Investment Summit was assembling investors around a $1-trillion ambition, I was in Vancouver at Get It Done B.C., where mayors, First Nations leaders, ministers and the people who actually build things were wrestling with the less glamorous half of the same question: what does it take to turn national ambition into steel, concrete, jobs and durable relationships?

Maybe that is the useful distinction of the moment. Canada no longer seems short of aspiration.

While we meeting Ksi Lisims LNG announced its third international offtake agreement, this time with Santos. Three days later, Reuters reported that LNG Canada’s partners could decide on Phase 2 as early as October, potentially doubling Kitimat’s export capacity to 28 million tonnes a year. At the same time, Ottawa was pitching global investors on a trillion-dollar investment drive and making new capital-investment tax incentives permanent.

The week’s storyline is not simply that resources are back. It is that capital, customers and political intent are beginning to line up at the same time.

But alignment is not execution. A generation’s worth of Canadian habit has taught us how easily “strategic” can become a synonym for “someday.” In the room Monday, the useful conversations were about sequence: permits, power, partners, labour, contracts. One thing has to unlock the next.

Leadership, I increasingly think, is less about announcing a destination than making the next irreversible step possible.

Are we finally learning to convert Canadian potential from a noun into a verb?

Stewart Muir is the president and CEO of Resource Works Society.

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