How Moonshot Zones could kickstart Canada’s AI-driven industrial future: Hunter Prize 2025

The Hub’s third annual Hunter Prize for Public Policy, generously supported by the Hunter Family Foundation, focused on solving Canada’s stagnant living standards and slow productivity growth. A diverse group of ten finalists has been chosen from nearly 250 entries, with the finalists and winners chosen by an esteemed panel of judges, including Theo Argitis, Hon. Lisa Raitt, Frances Donald, Jack Mintz, and Alicia Planincic. The Hub is pleased to run essays from each finalist this week that lay out their plans to help solve this persistent policy problem. The Hunter Prize is made possible thanks to the support of the Centre for Civic Engagement. Canada stands at a generational inflection point. Productivity has stagnated, major projects face significant regulatory delay, and the nation’s comparative advantages in natural resources, energy, and talent are being eroded by faster-moving peers. The challenge is no longer identifying what to build, but rebuilding our institutional capacity to deliver. Artificial intelligence, clean technology, and the reconfiguration of global supply chains are redefining economic power. Nations that can deploy technology rapidly across their industrial bases will dominate the coming century. Yet Canada continues to struggle with a regulatory and investment environment designed for another era: fragmented, risk-averse, and poorly coordinated. The result is measurable. Only one major project, Cedar LNG, was approved in the four years following the Impact Assessment Act of 2019, before the Supreme Court of Canada ruled key provisions of that act unconstitutional in Reference re Impact Assessment Act (2023 SCC 23). Investors interpret this not as caution, but as paralysis. The issue is not environmental protection, which remains essential, but the cumulative inefficiency of overlapping processes that do not produce better outcomes. If Canada is to restore its competitiveness and exercise real economic sovereignty, it must adopt a model of regulatory modernization that accelerates projects of national interest while maintaining rigorous standards. The Moonshot Zones framework provides such a model. Moonshot Zones: A framework for national interest economic regions Moonshot Zones are nationally designated regions of strategic economic importance, established under the Building Canada Act through simple order-in-council. They are designed to fast-track projects that integrate artificial intelligence and advanced technologies into Canada’s traditional industries, energy, mining, agriculture, and manufacturing, transforming them into globally competitive, technology-enabled export ecosystems. Unlike traditional “special economic zones,” Moonshot Zones do not create new agencies or programs. They operate within existing legislative authority and administrative structures. The federal cabinet designates eligible regions based on criteria such as: Strategic location within a trade corridor or logistics network; Concentration of critical resources or industrial potential; Alignment with national productivity, energy, and security objectives. This approach reframes industrial strategy around place-based competitiveness rather than sectoral subsidy. Each Zone becomes a platform to align federal, provincial, and Indigenous decision-making; streamline overlapping assessments; and concentrate private capital and innovation where Canada holds a comparative advantage. Regulatory modernization through consolidated authorization At the core of the framework is a Consolidated Authorization Document (CAD), a single, coordinated federal approval replacing the dozens of permits that currently govern major projects. Under the Building Canada Act, once a project or region is designated in the national interest, the responsible minister is empowered to issue one integrated authorization covering all required federal approvals. The Major Projects Management Office (MPMO) would act as the coordinating secretariat, ensuring that departmental reviews proceed concurrently rather than sequentially. Departments retain regulatory authority, but must operate under unified project schedules with clear decision timelines. The effect is a system that is faster, clearer, and more predictable, and one that rewards diligence rather than procedural endurance. Additional mechanisms reinforce accountability: Equivalency agreements allow validated provincial or Indigenous assessments to substitute for redundant federal reviews, advancing the principle of “one project, one assessment, one decision.” Sunset clauses ensure outdated conditions are retired once risks have been mitigated. Automatic escalation triggers resolve interdepartmental impasses through deputy minister or cabinet-level coordination. Together, these reforms embody regulatory modernization; not deregulation, but redesign for clarity, efficiency, and trust. Embedding artificial intelligence as national infrastructure Moonshot Zones explicitly integrate Canadian-built AI and digital tools as infrastructure layers within regulated industries. AI-enabled compliance, such as real-time environmental monitoring, digital twins for project simulation, or automated reporting, can become a condition of approval. Projects that adopt Canadian-owned AI solutions will receive priority permitting and access to existing innovation instruments such as SR&ED credits, the Strategic Innovation Fund, and procurement pilot programs. The objective is twofold: accelerate the adoption of generative AI across the real economy and ensure Canadian intellectual property is commercialized and adopted domestically rather than offshored. Implementation and fiscal realignment Moonshot Zones are designed to be fiscally neutral. The framework repurposes existing tools rather than creating new spending programs. Federal development agencies, BDC, EDC, and SDTC can prioritize projects located within designated zones. Tax incentives, such as clean technology credits and accelerated depreciation, can be adjusted to favour capital investments in AI-integrated industrial projects. Implementation would begin with a pilot phase of up to 10 regions, including: The Edmonton-Fort Saskatchewan Hydrogen and Energy Corridor, advancing hydrogen and carbon capture technologies; The Ring of Fire-Sudbury Critical Minerals Zone, anchoring an end-to-end EV supply chain; The Halifax-Guysborough Clean Energy and Aquaculture Hub, combining offshore wind, tidal energy, and ocean tech; and The Saguenay-Montréal Green Manufacturing Corridor, building AI-driven clean manufacturing clusters. Each pilot would be monitored against defined performance metrics such as investment attracted, project timelines, export diversification, and AI adoption. A new industrial compact Canada’s economic stagnation is not inevitable. It is the result of policy fragmentation that prevents alignment between technological capability, regulatory design, and national ambition. Moonshot Zones offer a disciplined framework to reconnect those elements. They demonstrate that regulatory modernization can coexist with environmental protection and Indigenous partnership; that artificial intelligence can be embedded responsibly in industrial systems; and that the federal government can act with coherence and urgency using powers it already holds. The path forward does not require new bureaucracy. It requires institutional courage: to decide, to coordinate, and to deliver. Read the policy paper: