Liberals table bill to speed up major project approvals, avert labour disruptions

Prime Minister Mark Carney's government tabled a sweeping bill on Monday meant to fast-track approvals for major projects, cut their review times and create zones of "national interest" to pre-approve certain types of projects.

Bill C-39, called the Building Canada Strong Act, is also proposing major changes to collective bargaining, including the use of more federal mediation to get deals done and repair relationships between unions and businesses.

"This legislation will give our country the tools we need to build more, better and more efficiently. We know the challenge before us. We cannot control decisions made by other countries, but we can control how we are prepared here at home. To do that, we need the right infrastructure," Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said at a news conference.

Senior government officials briefing reporters said the proposed "regions of national interest" will afford projects the same treatment as projects of national interest. That includes requiring consultations before an area receives the designation and, if it does, allowing it to receive special exemptions to a dozen different laws.

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Two discussion papers released in May said Ottawa was looking to create so-called "economic zones." Those zones would allow the federal cabinet to decide which activities would be allowed in them and give ministers the power to pre-approve projects there.

And while the discussion papers highlighted certain types of projects — such as transportation corridors, telecommunications networks and energy production and transmission — the bill, as written, allows the government to apply a wide range of projects to these zones.

The bill also proposes removing the responsibility for reviewing many big projects, such as pipelines and power transmission lines, from the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.

The Canada Energy Regulator would be responsible for handling reviews for international and interprovincial pipelines, transmission lines and offshore renewable energy projects. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission would handle reviews for nuclear and uranium projects.

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Senior government officials also said the bill would amend the Impact Assessment Act to establish one-year federal review timelines, while timelines for small and medium projects under the Energy Regulator and Nuclear Commission would be reduced from one year to six months.

The federal government has said that during consultations on the bill, it was told by industry that the level of expertise on energy projects that lived at the Canada Energy Regulator couldn't be found at the Impact Assessment Agency.