Big Things Are Getting Done — What Comes Next?
This government has not been short on big ideas. What I saw at Canada 2020’s From Ambition to Action: Getting Big Things Done 3.0 conference in Ottawa this week is that the more interesting conversation is increasingly about what comes next.
Across discussions on infrastructure, critical minerals, the North, electricity, housing, artificial intelligence, and investment, speakers kept returning to questions of execution.
How do we finance projects? How do we build the infrastructure that makes other investments possible? How do we involve Indigenous partners early? Where are the gaps in domestic supply chains? And how do we translate policy announcements into projects that actually get built?
From identifying priorities to delivering them
One of the day’s more memorable comments came from Elizabeth Wademan, President and CEO of the Canada Development Investment Corporation.
Speaking about CDEV’s role as a commercial and financial advisor to the federal government — including its involvement with projects such as Hibernia and Trans Mountain and its delivery of the $10-billion Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program — Wademan ended on a notably optimistic challenge: with policy support and capital increasingly in place, “our collective greatest risk is not being bold enough.”
It was a fitting comment for a conference about getting things done.
Much of the federal government's current agenda is built around ambition. Major projects, trade diversification, defence, critical minerals, housing, infrastructure, and economic resilience have all had their airtime over the past 16 months. But as those priorities move from announcements toward implementation, the questions become considerably more complicated.
The “missing middle” matters
That point came through clearly during the discussion on scaling Canada’s defence mineral supply chain.
Panellists focused on what they described as the “missing middle” between critical mineral extraction and refining, as well as projects becoming stalled in the “Valley of Death” before reaching commercialization.
Canada can identify critical minerals. It can create strategies. It can establish funding programs and encourage investment. But building an actual supply chain requires the less headline-grabbing pieces in between: processing capacity, infrastructure, financing, customers, and viable projects.
Sometimes the infrastructure isn't the headline project
Another theme that was weaved throughout the conference was the importance of enabling infrastructure.
The critical minerals conversation returned to regional infrastructure and processing capacity. Discussions about development in the North brought together infrastructure, finance, environmental review, and public policy. An entire panel focused on electricity as a foundation for Canada's economic ambitions.
The electricity discussion connected a number of files that are often treated as separate. Housing growth, industrial development, investment attraction, transportation electrification, and major projects all depend, to varying degrees, on access to reliable, affordable electricity.
That creates a different way of thinking about infrastructure. The project receiving political attention is not always the investment that ultimately determines whether it can proceed.
Getting big things done in the North means getting them done differently
The discussion on Arctic sovereignty and development added another dimension to the conversation. Mark Cliffe-Phillips of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board emphasized the distinctive context in which major projects proceed in the Northwest Territories: modern and historic treaties, self-government, Indigenous rights, and resource co-management.
It was an important counterpoint to broader conversations in Ottawa about speed. There is an understandable desire to reduce timelines and move projects forward more quickly. But “faster” cannot mean applying the same process everywhere and expecting the same result.
Context matters. So does understanding who needs to be involved, what authorities they hold, and how decisions are actually made. That is particularly true in the North, but the underlying lesson applies much more broadly. Getting stakeholders, governments, and communities involved early can make the process look slower at the outset, but in many cases, it may be what makes faster execution possible later.
Economic policy and national security are becoming harder to separate
The day's conversations also reflected another shift that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: economic policy and national security are converging.
That was obvious in a discussion explicitly connecting critical minerals with Canada's defence supply chain. But it was also present in conversations about artificial intelligence, domestic capacity, investment, and Canada's position in a changing global economy.
The panelists framed the question of Canadian AI sovereignty around Canadian choice and control: preserving Canada's ability to decide what we build, what we partner on, and what we buy, while retaining meaningful ownership of the intellectual property, talent, and economic value created here.
This theme is present across a wide range of policy discussions happening in Ottawa. Governments are increasingly asking not simply whether something creates economic growth, but what capabilities Canada needs to retain, where dependencies create vulnerabilities, and how domestic capacity contributes to economic security.
What this means for government relations
My biggest takeaway from the day was not a particular project or policy announcement, but how interconnected the federal government's priorities have become.
A critical-minerals project can simultaneously be an infrastructure file, an Indigenous economic participation file, a defence file, a trade file, and an energy file. Electricity policy can become industrial policy. AI policy can become a question of economic sovereignty. Northern infrastructure can simultaneously implicate transportation, defence, natural resources, Indigenous rights, and Arctic security.
This complexity has implications for government relations. It is no longer enough to know which department nominally owns your policy area or which Minister you think might champion your issue. Effective advocacy increasingly requires understanding the wider policy environment around an issue: who else has an interest in it, what government is ultimately trying to accomplish, what obstacles stand between policy and implementation, and where an organization's expertise genuinely fits.
It also requires listening carefully to how government and other decision-makers are talking about their priorities. Words like resilience, sovereignty, capacity, corridors, partnerships, and execution are not just the latest buzzwords circulating around Ottawa. They tell us something about how government is defining the problems it is trying to solve.
After spending the day listening to the people responsible for financing, regulating, developing, and thinking about some of Canada's largest projects, that was what stayed with me. Getting big things done is not simply about having bigger ambitions. Increasingly, it is about understanding all of the pieces between ambition and execution, and getting those pieces working together.
