Ottawa has acquired a plan to make decisions faster. It begins, as these things must, with a year of contemplation.
The Task Force for Modernizing Government launched Thursday. Nine former chief executives and senior public servants, privately funded, one year mandate, three priority files. Digital government and AI. Major projects. Arctic sovereignty. The stated goals are faster and simpler decision making, better coordination, and clearer accountability for results inside the federal machine.
Savour the composition for a moment. Nine people who spent their careers operating the machine have formed a committee outside the machine to explain the machine to the machine. The private sector is paying for it, presumably because asking the government to fund a review of why government reviews take so long would have required a review.
The Diagnosis Is Not in Dispute
Nothing here is a mystery requiring twelve months of fieldwork. Alberta has spent a decade making the identical argument about major projects, in filings, in court, at first ministers’ tables, and was told it was being impatient. Impatience, it turns out, was simply arriving at the conclusion early.
The province filed its West Coast Oil Pipeline application with the federal Major Projects Office on July 2, a live experiment in whether the machine can process a decision inside an investment cycle. The same week the task force launched, the first ministers set fresh deadlines of their own, pre-development work on electricity interties done by July 2027, projects underway by the end of 2028. Deadlines about deadlines. The genre is thriving.
The Cost of the Meantime
Underneath the comedy sits an iron law of capital that no communique repeals. A decision delayed past the investment cycle has already been made. The money does not wait in the lobby reading last year’s magazines. It goes to Texas, or Australia, or wherever a yes can be obtained inside a business plan’s lifetime, and it sends a postcard.
So the task force’s real deadline is not the report date. It is every board meeting between now and then where a project with a Canadian option and a foreign option picks the one with a schedule.
A Standing Offer
To the nine, sincerely, good luck. The cause is worthy and the instinct to fix it is correct. But if the panel wants to save eleven months, Alberta will happily supply the findings by return mail. Bind the regulator to its own clock. Run one review per project instead of a federal one stapled to a provincial one. Write decisions that survive court. Publish who is accountable when none of that happens.
No charge. Though at current federal rates, that advice is worth about a year of study.
What are the odds the year of study ends in anything faster than another study?
