Regulatory Gridlock Isn't Environmental Stewardship
Canada has spent years delaying projects in the name of the environment. The economic costs are becoming impossible to ignore
Canada cannot build a prosperous future if every major project becomes an endless regulatory exercise. Yet that is the logic behind much of the opposition to Ottawa’s proposed Strategy to Protect Nature.
In criticizing the strategy, Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society National Executive Director Sandra Schwartz described nature protection as “nation-building infrastructure.” She is right. But if nature is infrastructure, then it must be subject to the same trade-offs and hard choices as every other form of infrastructure.
Schwartz’s phrase deserves scrutiny because infrastructure is not a synonym for “sacred.” Infrastructure is what societies build, maintain, prioritize and sometimes reroute when circumstances change. It is subject to cost-benefit analysis, to competing demands, to the recognition that doing nothing has costs too.
Roads get built through difficult terrain. Pipelines cross watersheds. Transmission lines bisect habitat. The logic of infrastructure is precisely the logic of trade-offs. If Schwartz wants the rhetorical dignity of calling nature infrastructure, she must accept the consequences that follow. She cannot borrow the prestige of the concept while refusing its implications.
Her four specific objections to the proposed legislation are not frivolous. Concentrating permitting authority in a single minister does carry political risk. Compressing assessment timelines can, in genuinely complex cases, lead to decisions that overlook important variables. These are reasonable concerns. What is not reasonable is the treatment Schwartz gives them: presenting each policy change as a near-certain step toward extinction, without once acknowledging what the current regime has cost.
Canada’s record of major project approvals over the past decade is not a story of careful stewardship producing sound outcomes. It is a story of interminable processes, judicially remanded decisions, legislatively expanded criteria and investment redirected elsewhere while Canadians argued procedure. Energy East did not die because it was a bad project; it died because the assessment goalposts shifted mid-review. Trans Mountain required federal ownership and Court interventions before shovels hit the ground. Defending that baseline as though it were a neutral scientific instrument rather than a contested political construction is not analysis; it is poor institutional habit dressed as principle.
Schwartz’s framing entirely obscures a broader lesson. The wealthiest, most economically productive market economies have historically also been the best environmental stewards. Prosperity funds environmental monitoring, remediation technology, habitat acquisition and species recovery programs. Poverty does not protect ecosystems; it exhausts them. A decade of regulatory attrition has left Canada visibly poorer in ambition and capacity, with capital flowing to jurisdictions that make decisions.
Reclaiming the balance between responsible development and environmental protection is not a concession to short-term corporate interest. It is the precondition for having the wealth to take nature seriously over the long term.
The science-versus-politics distinction Schwartz draws is equally strained. She worries that ministerial decision-making would subordinate expertise to politics. Presumably the existing system, which incorporated gender-based analysis and broad cultural criteria under Bill C-69’s expanded mandate, represents the science-first alternative. Those additions were not scientifically derived; they were politically chosen.
Every decision about what counts as a relevant impact, who gets standing and what constitutes adequate mitigation is a political choice embedded in a technical process. The question is not whether politics enters project assessment, but which political values determine the outcome and whether the electorate has any meaningful recourse.
Schwartz is on stronger ground with the species she invokes. Boreal caribou are listed as threatened under the federal Species at Risk Act, with populations declining across most of their range due to habitat disturbance and increased predation. Southern Resident killer whales number just 74 individuals as of the 2025 census, down from a peak of 98 in 1995. Conservation matters, and a serious country does not treat its natural inheritance as an externality to be optimized away.
But the causal chain she implies, that fast-tracking industrial approvals will drive these species to extinction, is asserted rather than demonstrated. Scientists identify the primary threats to Southern Resident killer whales as Chinook salmon scarcity, pollution and vessel noise; assessment timeline length does not appear in the literature as a meaningful variable. Deploying charismatic endangered species as the face of a regulatory dispute is a technique, not an argument.
The deeper problem is her treatment of community. Many in Canada’s resource-dependent regions have watched environmental review processes drag on indefinitely while their economic futures stall. Elected band councils have supported projects that hereditary chiefs and southern NGOs have opposed. Too often, environmental groups treat communities that agree with them as legitimate and portray those that support development as victims of corporate capture.
If nature is truly infrastructure, then Canada must sometimes build through it, around it and in ways that accommodate it, accepting that inaction has consequences and that the costs of nothing are paid by real people in real places.
Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.
This was published last week in Epoch Times.