Nation-Building Projects? How about Airships?
Crawford Kilian ~ The Tyee
(Image via Flying Whales)
Mark Carney’s Liberals have announced their nation-building infrastructure plan, and it’s a bit of a letdown.
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Most of the first five projects are already well along in the approval process, and most involve exports, energy, extraction or all three. If the projects go as planned, we’ll see expansions to the Port of Montreal and Kitimat’s LNG terminal, Canada will build a small modular nuclear reactor, and our government will back copper mines in Saskatchewan and B.C.
The next six don’t seem much better: a carbon-capture project in Alberta; wind turbines off the Nova Scotia coast; high-speed rail (at last!) between Toronto and Quebec City; an Arctic security corridor; improving the port of Churchill, Manitoba; and development of Ontario’s Ring of Fire.
The carbon-capture process is an obvious boondoggle, an attempt to put lipstick on the pig of expanded oilsands production. Carbon capture and sequestration are expensive, unreliable and environmentally hazardous. They serve mainly as a distraction from continued fossil fuel production.
The others might be nice to have, especially the high-speed rail, but it’s hard to see anything notably nation-building about any of them. We’ve always been hewers of wood and drawers of water, so hewing copper ore and pumping LNG are nothing really new. Such projects will create some jobs, mostly temporary, and some taxes, mostly permanent, and a lot of emissions. But they almost all depend on bribing the private sector into actually doing the work.
I’d like to suggest an alternative project, one that would surprise the world and surprise Canadians themselves. What’s more, it would be notably low-emission.
The railway tied the country together in the 19th century, but only the southernmost strip above the U.S. border. The vast northern hinterland and its people were largely ignored. A sign of that neglect is that only now is Carney proposing an Arctic security corridor to improve transport across the North from Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories to a new deepwater port to be built in Grays Bay, Nunavut. This would involve an all-weather, 600-kilometre road to the Arctic Ocean, which some critics say would interfere with caribou migration.
Read original full article by Crawford Kilian:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2025/09/19/Nation-Building-Projects-Airships/