Ottawa found the cheapest way to hit a defence spending target. Widen the definition of defence.
A Lab Bill With A NATO Stamp On It
On August 10 the federal government handed PCL Construction a $768.6 million contract to build a science campus in Ottawa. Six buildings, going up on the grounds of an existing federal laboratory site shared by food inspection, border services, health and public health researchers. Ground broke back in 2024. The doors open in 2031. Seven years, one campus, a couple of postal codes from Parliament Hill.
The current phase runs close to $1.05 billion. That is roughly half the planned scope of the whole project. When it is finished, the campus holds about 275 employees and 25 science programs. Good people, doing real work. Nobody is arguing food inspection labs are a scam.
The site being replaced is not new either. Public works records show the existing federal laboratory at that Fallowfield Road address was built in 1972. Six new buildings there will consolidate researchers currently spread across seven aging facilities, drawn from four different departments and agencies. As modernization projects go, this one is defensible on the merits. It is the label stapled to the invoice that is the problem.
Cranes In The Capital, Counted As National Defence
Here is the part that should stop you mid-scroll. The same federal release says this project should contribute about $900 million toward Canada’s NATO-related security and resilience spending over the next ten years. A food safety and border science campus, filed under NATO commitments.
Fair enough, technically. NATO’s newer spending framework counts more than tanks and troops now. Resilience infrastructure counts. But when the definition stretches this far, watch how fast the number stops meaning what people think it means when a minister quotes it on television.
Process Has A Favourite Postal Code
Nobody sensible argues against food safety labs. The argument is about sequence, and sequence is where this falls apart. A campus inside Ottawa gets a signed contract and a firm 2031 finish date. Meanwhile the export projects that would actually grow the tax base Ottawa spends from sit in a comment window that closes in September, with no contract, no crane, no finish date at all.
Albertans have heard the line for years. These things take time because process takes time. Environmental review takes time. Consultation takes time. Regulatory certainty takes time. Funny how a $768.6 million construction contract on Fallowfield Road in Ottawa moved from announcement to signed contractor in under a year, while a pipeline or an export terminal sits waiting for the same government to finish reviewing itself.
Ottawa is not wrong that Canada needs to spend more on the things NATO counts. It is also true that a lab renovation is an easier thing to greenlight than a major resource project. Fewer stakeholders, fewer jurisdictions, no interprovincial pipeline politics, no consultation process that can run for years. That is exactly why it should not be allowed to stand in for the harder work of actually clearing Alberta’s bigger projects. But the gap between what Alberta sends to Ottawa and what comes back already runs into the hundreds of billions. Every dollar that gets counted twice, once as a science campus and once as a defence commitment, is a dollar that never had to compete with the projects actually sitting in Alberta’s queue.
What This Actually Tests
Big federal infrastructure projects are not new, and neither is Ottawa building things in Ottawa. Trans Mountain’s own price tag is the reminder of what happens when public money, not private capital, ends up carrying a major project from start to finish. The bill runs long, and the taxpayer is the one holding it at the end.
What is new is the accounting. Filing a domestic construction contract under a NATO defence line makes the government’s numbers look better on a spreadsheet without a single additional resource project getting approved a day sooner. Nine years from ground-breaking to some ministers standing at a podium next to a defence spending chart, that is what this is. A photo op wearing a hard hat.
Alberta is not asking Ottawa to stop building labs. Alberta is asking why an approval that took under a year in the nation’s capital takes half a decade everywhere export infrastructure actually needs to get built, and why the projects that would let this country spend on defence without accounting tricks keep landing behind the ones a few kilometres from the department that funds them.
Should defence spending mean defence, or whatever a department in Ottawa decides to file under it this year?
