The
Empty
Schedule.
In June 2025 Parliament gave cabinet the power to name a project and, by naming it, settle in advance every federal determination that project would otherwise have to survive. Fourteen months later the list of named projects is still blank — and the notice that ends that was published on the first of August.
“He’s in the middle of selling off vast resources to foreign buyers, privatizing airports, reversing all the progress made on climate change and trampling over Indigenous sovereignty to do it. He’s so popular because he’s done everything conservatives wanted.”
Two accusations, the same week, the same government, pointing in opposite directions. One says communism. The other says he has done everything conservatives wanted. Both are arguing about which end of a line he stands on. The thing that actually changed is not on that line, and it passed with votes from both ends of it.
There is a statute underneath all of this. It is the Building Canada Act, enacted as section 4 of chapter 2 of the Statutes of Canada, 2025, and it received royal assent on 26 June 2025 as the second half of Bill C-5. It is short. Most of the argument about it has been about the man who introduced it, which is a way of not reading it.
The Act works by naming. Cabinet may, by order, add a project to a list called Schedule 1. A project on Schedule 1 is a “national interest project,” and that status does one specific thing, set out in a single sentence in section 6. The sentence is the whole mechanism, and neither the collage nor its critics mentioned it.
What dies, and what gets worse.
The claim has five moving parts. Three of them do not survive the record as stated. Two do, and one of those turns out to be pointing at something larger than the person making it seems to have realised.
- “selling off vast resources to foreign buyers.” No transaction answering that description is on the record for this period, and the statute everybody is angry about is expressly barred from touching the question. Section 21(2) lists sixteen Acts that the Governor in Council is not authorized to add to Schedule 2 — the schedule of laws a designation can override. The Investment Canada Act is on that list. So is the Foreign Influence Transparency and Accountability Act. Foreign-ownership review is one of the things the designation power was specifically written not to reach.
- “reversing all the progress made on climate change.” The word that fails is all. The consumer fuel charge was removed effective 1 April 2025; the industrial carbon price on large emitters was kept. And the Act itself lists, at section 5(6)(e), the extent to which a project can “contribute to clean growth and to meeting Canada’s objectives with respect to climate change.” That is real text. It is also one of five factors cabinet may consider, in a subsection that opens by permitting cabinet to consider “any factor that the Governor in Council considers relevant.” A factor you may consider is not a constraint. The claim overstates; the statute’s climate language is weaker than it reads.
- “he’s done everything conservatives wanted.” This is the line talking. A power to move a decision from a regulator to cabinet is not a left-wing or a right-wing act; it is an answer to a different question — where does the decision get made — and there is no position on the left/right spectrum that answers it. Scoring it as a conservative win is precisely how an instrument of this size goes unexamined by both sides at once. The collage made the identical error in the opposite direction and called it communism.
- “privatizing airports.” Survives, narrowed. On 15 September 2026 the government confirmed that Canada’s four largest airports — Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver — will be opened to private investment through long-term operating concessions; the enabling legislation, amending the Canada Transportation Act, received royal assent on 18 June 2026. The Crown retains the land and the underlying assets. So “privatizing” is wrong about title and right about control — which happens to be the exact distinction this volume is about.
- “trampling over Indigenous sovereignty to do it.” Survives. Nine Ontario First Nations filed a constitutional challenge to Bill 5 and Bill C-5 in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice on 14 July 2025; five more joined in February 2026, making fourteen. The Act does require consultation: section 7(2)(c) before the authorising document issues, and section 7(2.1) a process permitting “active and meaningful participation.” Both are real duties. Neither of them touches section 6(1).
- The sentence nobody in the argument quoted. Section 6(1): “Every determination and finding that has to be made and every opinion that has to be formed in order for an authorization to be granted in respect of a national interest project is deemed to be made or formed … in favour of permitting the project to be carried out in whole or in part.” Not a deadline. Not a presumption that can be rebutted by evidence. A statutory instruction that the answer is yes.
You are consulted about the conditions. You are not consulted about the answer.
Nineteen enactments, one sentence.
A designation does not repeal anything. The Fisheries Act stays on the books. The Species at Risk Act stays on the books. What changes is the outcome of every decision made under them, for that project, in advance. Schedule 2 lists what is in range: twelve Acts of Parliament and seven sets of regulations. Section 22 goes further, letting cabinet make regulations exempting a designated project from any provision of those enactments outright, or varying how the provision applies to it.
Below is Schedule 2 as it actually reads. Throw the switch and watch what section 6(1) does to all nineteen at once.
Schedule 1 — National Interest Projects · as consolidated
| Item | Column 1 — Name of Project | Column 2 — Description |
|---|---|---|
Three blank rows. That is the whole schedule. It has not been amended since the day the Act came into force.
Section 6 does carry two qualifiers, and they matter. Subsection (2) says the deeming does not excuse a proponent from taking the measures an enactment requires of it. Subsection (3) says an authorization “is not to be granted solely on the basis of the deeming provision in subsection (1).” Read together, they mean the file still has to be built: the studies still get done, the measures still get taken, the conditions still get written, and section 7(5) makes those conditions binding as though imposed under the original statute.
What they do not do is leave the question open. The measures are about how. The conditions are about how. The one thing already settled, before any of it starts, is whether.
The most transparent way to not be able to say no.
The reflex on reading a power like this is to expect secrecy. The opposite is true, and it is the strangest thing in the statute. Section 8.1 requires the Minister, thirty days before the authorising document issues, to make public: all the conditions; the full contents of the studies and impact assessments; all the recommendations received from federal departments and agencies; and — paragraph (d) — “in an accessible written document, the reasons some of the recommendations were not accepted.”
Then paragraph (e). The Minister must also publish “a description of the normal regulatory process that would have been followed if the project had not been designated as a national interest project.” And subsection (2) requires, alongside it, a comparative analysis of the conditions against the recommendations, plus “an assessment of the risks of disregarding the recommendations that were not accepted.”
Parliament wrote into law an obligation to publish a description of the process being bypassed and a risk assessment of the advice being overridden. Section 23.1 adds an independent review of every designated project each financial year, tabled in both Houses. Section 5.1 — the only part of the Act amended since assent, on 26 March 2026 — requires a public registry carrying each project’s reasons, costs and timelines.
All of that sits in the same short statute as section 6(1), and none of it was bolted on afterwards: every one of those duties was in the Act on the day it came into force. It is an unusual amount of daylight. It is also, as a matter of arithmetic, incapable of changing anything, because the determination it illuminates was deemed in favour of the project before the first page of it was written.
The file will be complete. The answer was never in the file.
Fourteen months, nothing on the list.
Dates, in order. Everything here is from the consolidated statute, the Canada Gazette, the Major Projects Office’s own pages, or the court file.
Read that list as a critic of the government and it does not say what you expected. The apparatus has not been abused, because it has not been used. Eighteen projects sit on a referral page under a sentence saying they have been “deemed to be of national importance and significance and … referred to us for further assessment and consultation.” Not one of them is a national interest project. The distinction is not cosmetic: referral triggers nothing, and designation triggers all nineteen enactments at once.
Read it as a defender of the government and it does not say what you expected either. A power that has never been exercised has never been tested — not by a court, not by the registry, not by the annual review, not by section 8.1’s thirty days of daylight. Every safeguard in the statute is a safeguard that has never had to work. The first time any of them is load-bearing will be the first designation, and that notice is already published.
The argument was about a man’s ideology.
The thing that changed was a sentence about who gets to say no.
It has not been used yet.
What would overturn this reading.
Three things that would change the finding
- A refusal after designation. Section 6(3) makes it formally possible for an authorization to be withheld notwithstanding the deeming provision. If a listed project is ever refused an authorization on its merits, the reading in this volume is wrong and section 6(1) is weaker than its words. Until a project is listed, there is no case either way.
- An order under section 4.1. The Act permits cabinet to define “national interest” by order, and requires that such an order set out specific criteria a proponent must meet — with a report tabled in both Houses explaining any delay past fifteen days from coming into force. As of October 2025 no such order had been made. If one now exists with binding criteria, the discretion described here is narrower than described. This is the single most load-bearing open fact about the power.
- The Ontario ruling. Fourteen First Nations are asking a court whether legislation of this shape can be reconciled with the honour of the Crown and section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982. The file has been open since July 2025 and is undecided. A ruling either way rewrites this volume.
Where to check every line above.
- Building Canada Act, S.C. 2025, c. 2, s. 4 — consolidated text, including sections 5, 6, 7, 8.1, 21, 22 and 23.1 and both schedules: Justice Laws Website. The blank Schedule 1 is visible in the XML consolidation.
- Royal assent, 26 June 2025, and the structure of Bill C-5: LEGISinfo, C-5 (45-1).
- Notice under section 5(1.1) for the West Coast Oil Pipeline, 1 August 2026: Canada Gazette, Part I, Vol. 160, No. 31, Supplement.
- Projects referred to the Major Projects Office, and the wording of their status: Privy Council Office.
- Removal of the consumer fuel charge effective 1 April 2025: Department of Finance.
- The First Nations constitutional challenge to Bill 5 and Bill C-5, filed 14 July 2025: Canada’s National Observer; five further nations joining, February 2026: CBC News.
- The step before this one — why “communist” could not be fact-checked until it was moved: theaxes.fyi, lesson 15.
Visual direction after the oceanographic films of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the crew of the R.V. Calypso, 1943–1996. The saucer is the SP-350 “Denise”. No affiliation; the debt is the point.