I'm building a company to buy the businesses that dig under these projects
I'm building HydroCore, an industrial services acquisition platform focused on hydrovac and related infrastructure businesses across Canada. That makes me bullish on Canadian infrastructure by trade, and it means I need to know which announcements actually turn into work, because that is what the businesses I'm trying to buy get paid for.
Every project on this Board starts underground. Somebody has to expose the utilities, daylight the crossings and dig the foundations before anything else happens. So I read infrastructure news the way I read a data room. Trust the announcement, but due diligence is where the deal is actually revealed.
The information to tell the two apart is out there, but it is scattered across bank research, government inventories, trade press and regulator filings, and none of it is written for the people who run the trucks. I keep this Board for my own work anyway. Publishing it costs me one day a quarter, and every correction that comes back makes it better.
Everything the headlines say is coming
There has been a flurry of announcements in the last six weeks: nearly $500 billion of commitments out of the investment summit, a $52 billion data centre expansion in Saskatchewan, a $70 billion hydro deal in Labrador, and bank lending pledges stacked to the ceiling. If you only read the headlines, Canada sanctioned a generation of infrastructure since the middle of August.
Strip the press releases out and the case still holds, in numbers that owners and lenders put their names to. ReNew Canada's Top100, which only counts public-sector projects, hit a record $343 billion this year, with nuclear doing most of the lifting. Natural Resources Canada's inventory of energy, mining and forestry projects stood at 504 projects worth $632.6 billion as of September 2024, its last published edition. The Canada Infrastructure Bank has closed loans on 112 projects worth $54.8 billion, and 90 of them are under construction.
And where private money has landed, it is real. Meta is excavating a $13 billion site north of Edmonton. Cedar and Woodfibre are both past halfway on the coast. Teck spent a quarter of a billion dollars at Highland Valley in a single quarter. That is the case for a super cycle, and I believe most of it.
What usually happens between the press release and the shovel
Canada's track record between the announcement and the shovel isn't a secret, and it isn't a partisan point either. The Port of Montreal broke ground on its Contrecoeur terminal this April, on a project that had been in the works for decades. Bay du Nord was approved in 2022, put on hold in 2023, and Equinor now says it will decide in early 2027 whether to build it at all. LNG Canada took close to seven years from final investment decision to first cargo, and that one went well.
Then there is what happens to the number once something does get built. The Ontario Line was $10.9 billion when it was announced in 2019, and Metrolinx now puts it around $34 billion. The North Coast Transmission Line doubled to $6 billion before a tower went up.
Regulation is part of that story, and anybody who has waited on a permit knows it. It isn't the whole story, though. Honda's $15 billion Ontario complex was suspended this May because of Honda's own losses, not a permit. Northvolt's parent went bankrupt in Sweden and the Quebec plant went with it. Dow stopped work at Fort Saskatchewan for nine months over market conditions. PowerCo has pushed its St. Thomas battery plant from 2027 to 2029, with about 60 people on a site that was supposed to be a gigafactory next year. Lately the thing killing announcements has been capital and demand, and the regulator has mostly been a bystander.
When the money is there, this country can move.
Enbridge went from federal approval to construction on Sunrise in under three months. Meta announced its Sturgeon County site on July 9 and had most of it excavated by the middle of September.
Ottawa's answer to the slow projects was the Building Canada Act and the Major Projects Office. Fifteen months in, the office lists 18 referred projects, four of them have a notice in the Canada Gazette, and none had been listed as a project of national interest when this edition was dated. On September 21, Ottawa tabled a second bill, C-39, the Building Canada Strong Act, for everything the Major Projects Office doesn't touch. The standard it sets is one project, one review, one year. It is at second reading and has decided nothing yet. The test is the same as for everything else on this Board: whether decisions actually show up inside a year.
The headline number is usually the wrong number. Canada Nickel's Crawford mine gets reported as a $70 billion project, but that is projected GDP, and the mine itself costs roughly US$2 billion to build. Bell's $52 billion includes the chips. Ksi Lisims is $10 billion, $20 billion or $30 billion depending on whether you count the pipeline.