Eric Lombardi: The 2030s could be Canada’s comeback decade

It will not happen by announcing more temporary goals or launching another round of projects. Yet that already seems to be the path of Mark Carney’s Liberal government, with Minister Hodgson recently promising that the first tranche of centrally planned national interest projects will be announced this fall. What it will really require is the courage to build systems and institutions that continuously invest. And above all, it will demand a new period of economic liberalization that unravels the cartelized socioeconomic system that has festered for decades and now dominates us. Projects are not systems We need to start with the way we build. Canadian politics has become consumed by ribbon-cutting announcements. A prime minister announces a target for carbon emissions. A premier pledges a new transit line. A minister unveils a housing strategy. The language is always grand, the timelines always conveniently long. But these goals are not systems. They are projects, designed to win headlines, not institutions designed to deliver value for money spent. Take Project Alto, Ottawa’s current high-speed rail effort. The promise first appeared in the 2015 Liberal election platform as “high-frequency rail.” Nearly a decade later, after endless dithering and procurement rounds, we finally have a consortium, but there won’t even be a design for another four years. That is more than 10 years of process without a shovel in the ground.  But the deeper problem isn’t just the delay. It’s that a consortium is not an institution. Alto is conceived as a one-off project, not as the seed to grow out a national network. France created the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF), its national railway company, to keep building and extending its Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) high-speed rail network. Japan’s Shinkansen grew corridor by corridor under permanent institutions. Those institutions didn’t just build trains—they recycled experience, capital, and capacity so the network could grow continuously. Canada, by contrast, builds a single line and calls it a day. And surely, when the day comes that we decide we need more high-speed rail, we will start the entire process from scratch again. That failure is reinforced by our budgeting mindset. Ottawa now promises “operational balance” but treats capital spending as irregular, one-off activities. But these investments produce the physical infrastructure that underpins long-term prosperity. We should be planning to invest consistently, through institutions whose entire purpose is to specialize in producing durable public assets at scale, rather than through the ad hoc processes we’ve perfected for lighting money on fire while delivering the thing itself. This same disease has spread throughout our public bureaucracies. Housing approvals are designed for litigation rather than throughput. Energy grids are built piecemeal instead of as national systems. Public services—from transit to permitting to health care—are geared to manage scarcity rather than expand capacity. We do not build systems that compound progress. We build projects, applaud the announcement, and then reinvent the wheel the next time. Every restart and every bespoke approval process creates new chances for incumbents, regulators, consultants, and unions to extract value. A true system that delivered continuously and reliably would leave little room for rent-seeking. Canada’s preference for projects over systems is no accident; it’s the natural expression of a deeper problem. Cartels have come to rule us The central flaw of our economy is not the “red tape” rules our politicians love to denounce almost as much as they love to create. It is cartelization. Industry after industry has become a cosy arrangement between government regulators, incumbent firms, and unions or associations. The players differ, but the outcome is the same: consumers pay more, new entrants are shut out, and the country’s long-term prosperity is quietly undermined. Telecom is the obvious case: Canadians pay some of the highest wireless bills in the developed world, sustained by policies that make entry difficult and connectivity lag. But airlines are no different, with ownership restrictions and slot allocations protecting incumbents while fares climb. Banking also shows the pattern clearly. Canadian rules conveniently discourage foreign challengers, even as our largest banks use their rent-seeking position at home to bankroll global expansion. Having a handful of global banks is not a bad thing in itself, but they would be investing more and offering better services to Canadians if global competitors were making a real play to capture market share here. Housing has been cartelized, too, though the mechanics look different. Modern planning systems stripped away the presumption that property owners can improve their land, replacing it with a labyrinth of permissions, appeals, and levies. Municipalities and development charges extract billions up front, while approval bottlenecks make new supply unpredictable. The result is a rationed market where public and private insiders extract value from scarcity. Health care may be the most consequential cartel of all. Our universal system has ossified into a monopoly, where provinces, medical associations, and unions collectively define delivery. Capital for new diagnostic and surgical capacity is squeezed because scarcity keeps the system fiscally manageable for provinces. Patients wait, not because there is no test, but because there is no capacity to test them. And we have convinced ourselves that universal coverage cannot coexist with private options, when, in nearly every other advanced system, that choice is what makes the coverage guarantee real. Canada, almost uniquely, has made monopoly the guardian of equity. The result is that the universal care guarantee too often means little more than a universal wait list. You’d better hope that pain in your chest really is just anxiety, because good luck getting the scan to know for sure. Almost every Canadian is protected by one cartel and punished by another. Workers, too, are drawn into fighting for scraps alongside the power players, defending rules that seem to secure their share but in practice make everyone poorer.1Consider Canada’s elevator sector: a collective agreement by the International Union of Elevator Constructors requires installers to drill key holes on site, work that could be done more efficiently in the factory. The result is higher costs and slower innovation, yet this practice persists under the guise of “work jurisdiction.” The real-life result is far fewer elevators, not more work for labourers. What looks tolerable in isolation becomes crippling in aggregate. Layered across industries and services, these rules explain why investment is weak, why productivity has stalled, and why Canadians feel they are working harder only to fall behind. That is what makes cartelization so dangerous: it hides in plain sight, defended within each sector, even as our national economy hollows out. Canada needs to liberalize its economy The way out of this situation is not another sterile debate about the size of government. Big or small, governments can succeed or fail. The real question is whether they act as neutral referees that create the conditions for competition or as cartel partners that shield insiders under the rhetorical guise of protecting Canadian interests.A genuine liberalization agenda would restore government to its proper role: setting clear, predictable rules that reduce risk, attract capital, and give Canadians the confidence to build and disrupt. Clarity is the most underrated form of stimulus because it turns ideas into investment and announcements into action. Interprovincial trade is a case in point. For years, premiers have promised to tear down barriers and harmonize credential recognition. In practice, little has changed. Progress rarely goes beyond non-binding memorandums of understanding, the kind that generate headlines but not results. The reason is simple: every entrenched stakeholder insists they deserve special treatment. Provincial regulators, industry associations, and professional bodies all pressure elected officials to shield them from out-of-province competition. The result is a patchwork of carve-outs that makes it easier to trade across borders internationally than within our own country. When clarity vanishes, gatekeepers thrive, and citizens pay the price. That is the hidden cost of process without decision. If our constitutional framework entrenches that confusion with regulatory fragmentation, then it deserves a second look. A federation designed for the 19th century cannot be sacred when 21st-century prosperity depends on clear authority, national scale, and institutions that actually deliver. That is what liberalization means in a Canadian context: clear rules, competitive markets, and institutions that work. Done correctly, Liberalization strengthens rather than weakens the welfare state. A richer, more competitive economy is what sustains higher wages, better services, and a tax base strong enough to fund them. The world is not zero-sum. Get the big systemic reforms right, and liberalization becomes one of the few policies that really is more than free. It’s time for takeoff At its root, this debate is about whether Canada still believes in development as a public good. The Canada of the mid-20th century built railways, highways, hydro, and Medicare—systems that compounded over time and reshaped daily life. But today we risk becoming something else: a country that manages scarcity instead of building abundance, that rations progress through permits and queues, that confuses stability with security. Stability is not progress. A nation can be stable and stagnant at the same time until suddenly, it’s neither. This is how once-wealthy countries fall behind. Without reform, Canada could drift toward becoming the Argentina of the 21st century. The 2030s can be different. They can be Canada’s catch-up decade. But only if we dismantle the cartels that insulate incumbents, rebuild government as a referee and system-builder instead of a game-rigger. It’s about time we treat real competition and development as progressive values again. Canada is not trapped by fate. We are trapped by drift. And our drift is a choice.