Never let a good crisis go to waste: Canada’s infrastructure imperative
Trade tensions have created Canada’s most energized infrastructure moment in a decade – but ambition alone won’t close the gap between nation-building plans and shovels in the ground
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“Never let a good crisis go to waste” has been said, and that’s exactly what Jay LeMoine is urging Canada not to do. As unprecedented trade tensions fundamentally alter the nation’s relationship with the United States, the urgency is around diversification. A flurry of activity – new federal legislation, a national investment summit, airport investment announcements, and cross-jurisdictional dialogue – has created what LeMoine describes as the most energized environment for project delivery he’s seen in a decade.
“We can’t miss this opportunity,” says LeMoine, a partner and Canadian head of infrastructure at Norton Rose Fulbright LLP in Vancouver. “This time of change is critical. There’s a real momentum at all levels to make these things work.”
There’s awareness of the first problem, with the recently announced Building Canada Act a meaningful step toward providing greater certainty for proponents. It rolls out a one-project, one-review approach and impact assessment coordination agreements with provinces – moves that are encouraging, says Katie Higgins, counsel at Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP in Toronto, but that won’t be enough on their own.
“One of our advantages in Canada is the strength of our institutions, but with that comes layers of complexity that can be hard to navigate, especially for new players coming into the market,” she notes, adding that running simultaneous rather than sequential reviews and coordinating requirements across federal, provincial, and municipal levels are changes that would go a long way.
Capital is ready, governments aren’t
Lisa Mitchell, president and chief executive officer of The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP), says meeting the moment means re-examining public-private partnership models that go beyond the design-build-finance-operate-and/or maintain definition that drove huge numbers of projects for more than 30 years in Canada.
“There is a large space between traditional design-builds and privatization where the public and private sector can share risks and pool funds that offer tremendous value for taxpayers,” she explains. “We need to remember that and once again explore how we can take global best practices and tweak them for the Canadian infrastructure ecosystem.”
LeMoine agrees, calling the divvying up of infrastructure responsibilities across the federal government, 10 provinces, three territories, and various municipalities “a uniquely Canadian challenge.”
“We’re seeing a real mishmash of delivery models in the market,” he says.
LeMoine argues jurisdictions moved too quickly away from public-private partnership models; “Fifteen years ago, we were all very happily delivering buckets and buckets full of P3 projects that were following a similar pattern, with real market acceptance, until we weren’t,” he notes.
The change means that governments are making decisions without a full accounting or understanding of what private capital participation delivered and can continue to provide.
“Private capital can work,” LeMoine says. “We’re leaving a big piece of the pie off the table by not involving it the way we did historically.”
The port and airport announcements may historically be political hot potatoes, LeMoine says, but ports are where he would focus first. Resolving capacity issues at Vancouver and Prince Rupert is critical to moving Canadian goods and services to Europe and Asia. The biggest projects – LNG, pipelines, critical minerals – were traditionally almost fully private, and getting them built is now a national priority. For any major resource project, meaningful Indigenous involvement is essential, and federal programs allowing Indigenous communities to fund equity contributions directly, rather than relying on the private sector to give up a portion, are part of making that possible.
“The question is how to deliver these in a way that gets them built,” LeMoine says. “All of these things are essential if we’re going to see these big nation-building projects go ahead.”
Norton Rose Fulbright is a global law firm with a deep commitment to our clients, their industries, and our people. That’s what makes us a powerful, trusted advisor to global and local organizations the world over. In Canada, we have more than 600 lawyers and patent and trademark agents in business law, litigation and disputes, intellectual property, and employment and labour, based in offices in Calgary, Montréal, Ottawa, Québec City, Toronto, and Vancouver.
The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, formed in 1993, is a national, non-partisan membership-based organization that advocates for infrastructure and services procurement models that provide efficient solutions to public sector objectives, provide value to taxpayers, and encompass each of the following four essential attributes of most effective P3s: allocate the appropriate risk transfer to the party best suited to manage it; consider the whole life cycle of the asset; drive innovation and efficiencies; and leverage private capital and expertise. The Council will first and foremost support the long-term alignment of incentives through the inclusion of private capital, given its demonstrated effectiveness as a tool to achieve desired outcomes.
The surge of nation-building projects now coming to market demands the model be broadened again. Even where a major project isn’t leveraging the P3 model, Higgins notes, important tools and concepts from P3 and other projects can still be applied more broadly to major projects and critical infrastructure investments; for example, the P3 community’s keen awareness of the importance of appropriate risk transfer and risk allocation tailored to the specifics of a project can attract more potential contractors and investment.
From CCPPP’s perspective, the fundamentals of leveraging private capital are obvious. The private sector, Mitchell is clear, is not the holdup. Capital is available and industry is ready. The gap is on the public side: specifically, a persistent lack of understanding of what role private capital can play and how to deploy it.
As a premier law firm with over 900 lawyers worldwide, Fasken is where excellence meets expertise. We are dedicated to shaping the future our clients want, precisely when it matters most. Our Infrastructure and Projects team works extensively with proponents, consortia, constructors, lenders, and other private sector project participants, as well as procuring authorities and project owners in multiple jurisdictions at different government levels across North America. Our team has been involved in some of North America’s largest and most complex infrastructure development, acquisition, and finance matters. Clients in both the public and private sectors rely on us to help structure around, and resolve, complex issues and challenges and to bring projects to a successful close on a cost-effective and timely basis.
“One of our advantages in Canada is the strength of our institutions, but with that comes layers of complexity that can be hard to navigate, especially for new players coming into the market”
Katie Higgins, Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP
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The delivery gap: a uniquely Canadian challenge
Though there’s no shortage of projects on the docket or ambition to move them forward, that’s not what gets shovels in the ground. The projects on the docket aren’t the purely public sector work most lawyers are used to – they’re massive undertakings that require fully private or public-private delivery.
There are two interconnected problems in delivering what’s required: regulatory approval timelines and a delivery model landscape that evolved out of necessity but without sufficient examination of what was working and what wasn’t.
Part of the problem is political. Canada had strong champions for private financing tools across governments for decades, but a new generation of decision-makers needs to fully understand what these tools can deliver.
“It’s not just about a single project; Canada needs a well-structured, investment-ready pipeline that is public, transparent, and predictable,” Mitchell says. “Investors want to understand how it fits into a broader strategy and what the enabling pieces are. The more we can be open and public about that, the more industry can rally around it.”
But even a perfect pipeline means nothing without the right people to deliver on it. Owner-side delivery teams may not have the same knowledge or experience as those who negotiated the deal. With the big projects on the prospectus, the labour component isn’t just about bodies. It’s also about increasing the capacity of Canada’s skilled trades, as well as advisors and professional consultants, such as engineers, with experience working on complex major projects.
The workforce must have the technical know-how to execute where a millimetre either way has repercussions, Higgins explains. Canada has built some of this experienced workforce and know-how through the delivery of large P3 and other complex major projects, but there’s still a need to increase capacity to execute on the ambitious major project pipeline, Higgins says.
“We can’t miss this opportunity. This time of change is critical. There’s a real momentum at all levels to make these things work”
Jay LeMoine, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP
Industry experts
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Katie Higgins
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP
Jay LeMoine
Norton Rose Fulbright LLP
Lisa Mitchell
The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP)
Lisa Mitchell is the president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP), a national, member-driven organization that brings together leaders from all orders of government and the private sector to shape the future of Canada’s infrastructure. Under her leadership, the Council is advancing the national dialogue on how innovative partnerships and private capital can help build resilient, sustainable, and high-performing infrastructure across the country. With more than 20 years of experience in leadership, communications, and public affairs and over a decade dedicated to advancing public-private partnerships, Mitchell has helped shape Canada’s modern infrastructure agenda.
The Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships (CCPPP)
Lisa Mitchell
Jay LeMoine is the Canadian head of the infrastructure sector at Norton Rose Fulbright LLP. He is a business lawyer whose work focuses on the commercial aspects of infrastructure projects and business transactions. His practice includes negotiating, drafting, and implementing commercial contracts, business structures, public-private partnerships, and infrastructure agreements. In addition to his P3 work, LeMoine regularly advises on a variety of business transactions, including commercial financings, acquisitions and divestitures of shares and assets, as well as on general contractual matters.
Norton Rose Fulbright LLP
Jay LeMoine
Katie Higgins is an experienced infrastructure lawyer with over a decade of experience advising clients on complex major public infrastructure projects.
She has expertise across diverse asset classes, including transit, health, development, and public safety projects. She advises clients throughout the project life cycle, including during procurement, pursuit, negotiation, transaction, construction, and operations and maintenance.
Higgins has advised both public and private sector clients on major infrastructure projects. Prior to joining Fasken, she practised as an associate at a major international law firm and subsequently served as a legal director at Infrastructure Ontario. She has extensive experience advising public owners on complicated and novel procurement law issues and strategies.
Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP
Katie Higgins
Published October 21, 2026
Canada’s infrastructure gap
6.6%
(Parliamentary Budget Officer, September 2025)
$159B
Federal government projected infrastructure spend, 2025–26 to 2029–30
Canada invests
of GDP on infrastructure – well below the 7.4% invested by high-performing peers
(PwC Canada, June 2026)
(Association of Canadian Port Authorities)
by 2040 to expand and diversify trade infrastructure
$21.5B
Canada’s port authorities will need to invest up to
(BuildForce Canada)
experienced construction workers projected to retire over the 2025–34 period
270,000
(Government of Canada, February 2026)
– job openings for skilled trades in construction expected by 2033, including 189,000 linked to anticipated retirements
<410,000
(Government of Canada, 2026)
skilled-trades job openings expected by 2033
<1.4M
Infrastructure workforce capacity challenge
(CCPPP)
projects, worth more than $139B – Canadian P3 projects undertaken over the past three decades
300+
A Team Canada moment
Canada isn’t starting from scratch. There exists hard-won institutional knowledge about risk allocation, phasing, and staging on complex projects. Sharing that more broadly across jurisdictions, earlier in the project life cycle, and finding “pockets of coordination” wherever possible, is key at this moment.
Conversations are not one-and-done, Mitchell says. The dialogue – whether it be provinces and territories with the federal government, or those governments with industry on how to best deliver – must continue.
“It’s not just about a single project; Canada needs a well-structured, investment-ready pipeline that is public, transparent, and predictable”
Lisa Mitchell, CCPPP
There’s also somewhat of a broken telephone effect with the general population that should be addressed more directly. Pension funds and institutional investors that have invested in airports around the world, for example, could change that by being more vocal about their interests.
“Some of the public discussion around privatization is far from the reality of what’s being considered,” LeMoine says of the public’s reaction after the Investment Summit. “Industry and government need to work together to explain the benefits for all stakeholders in taking a different approach to airport assets and operations.”
“We’ve got amazing talent and capabilities in this country – we’ve demonstrated that before, but we’re at a critical juncture. Industry stands at the ready: the more we can be at the table writ large, the more we can help with the planning, development, delivery, and execution.”
LeMoine agrees, urging everyone to put aside political bents and recognize that things are being done for a greater cause, and one that’s very important for the nation. There must be a “Team Canada” approach.
“I’m more fired up about delivering projects than I have been for 10 years because of what’s happening,” LeMoine says. “The momentum is there. Everyone is saying the right things – let’s just continue to do them.”
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