Prime Minister Mark Carney will introduce legislation next week aimed at cutting the time taken to approve pipelines, mines and large infrastructure projects to a hard ceiling of two years, his office confirmed on Friday. The bill is intended to land before the House rises for the summer and to be in force by autumn.
The proposed changes would consolidate the work of the Impact Assessment Agency, the Canada Energy Regulator and provincial bodies into a single sequenced review, with statutory deadlines that the federal cabinet could only override in narrow circumstances. The current process has stretched beyond five years for some projects, including the cancelled Energy East and TransMountain expansions.
Mr Carney, a former central banker who led the Liberals to a majority in last month's general election, has framed the reform as essential to a national push to diversify Canadian exports away from the United States and to capture rising global demand for critical minerals and lower-carbon energy. He pointed in his Friday remarks to the Conservative-supported Bill C-69, which the Trudeau government enacted in 2019, as "well-intentioned but too slow for what the moment requires".
Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, who survived an internal review on Wednesday after telling caucus he would "keep fighting", said his party would back faster approvals but would oppose any preservation of what he called the "yes-minister veto" reserved for the federal cabinet.
Industry groups welcomed the proposal. The Canadian Energy Pipeline Association said a predictable two-year window would unlock several stalled critical-minerals and natural-gas projects. The First Nations Major Projects Coalition said it would judge the bill on whether duty-to-consult obligations were preserved in substance, not merely in form.
Environmental groups signalled likely court challenges. Ecojustice argued that compressing assessments below current statutory minimums would make it harder to evaluate cumulative effects on watersheds and migratory species. The legal organisation said it expected to file references with provincial appellate courts within days of royal assent.