In summer, I head east to enjoy the vibe and the seafood and engage with great people that exude a certain calm yet exuberant zest for life that is appeals greatly to a downtown rat racer. Every year a small community comes together to reconstruct and install a length of beach-access stairs, which takes some work, because the ocean pummels.
Amongst the volunteers, an earnest and enthusiastic fellow shows up every year, sporting crisp pressed clothes and pristine work gloves that appear to have touched nothing more rugged than tissue paper, and this thoroughly nice guy wanders to and fro offering encouragement and gofer services while others pound and cut and lift and sweat and do.
No sleight intended; he is a good guy and not everyone is particularly rugged. It is just that this situation illustrates Canada’s predicament. There are people with clean gloves that mean well but are not advancing anything, and all sorts of people that have hammers in their hand and want to build. But the clean gloves crowd has a job to do first, and that is making construction possible.
Here are some clear examples that may illustrate things better, and consideration of the geopolitical ramifications.
Many have worked up a good hatred for Elon Musk, because he has gone out of his way to step on a lot of toes across the spectrum, which in itself is a singular talent: Who else can go from being a God of the left (mass produced electric vehicles!) To a pariah of the left (DOGE!) while almost at the same time repulsing the right (slamming Trump)? All the while doing what he does, which is build stuff. You may love or hate him based on ideological imperatives, but his ability to build is second to none.
Here is an example from a recent interchange on X. A much followed commentator provided an update on Musk’s Tennessee data centre project (originally dubbed Colossus (project) and Macrohard (building), with new additions called Macroharder and Minihard (odd names explained shortly). Here is that commentator’s update: “Macroharder takes up about 810,000 square feet. Minihard is about 312,000, and @CernBasher says it packs in a lot more compute despite the far smaller footprint. That’s why he calls Minihard a product, one that keeps evolving like everything Tesla and SpaceX build. He [Musk] walked through Colossus II in Memphis. Macrohard has about 550,000 GB200s, Macroharder about 220,000 GB300s, and Minihard is going up next to rows of Megapacks. A land swap clears space for a fifth data center, and a warehouse across State Line Road could become a sixth. In Brownsville, 444 acres now sit under Starbase for permitting.”
In that unique way he has, Musk actually responded: “Macroharder and Minihard both have 220k GB300s with 800 gig nics configured for training. Gun Range will have the same. Spam (used to house Hormel products) will have ~200k GB300s, but configured for inference, so much simpler networking and less than half the fiber.
I walked the whole Colossus 2 site around midnight and again this morning.
Good progress by the SpaceX team and contractors. Gun Range is tracking to be operational by end of November and Spam in December.”
That, people, is how you build stuff. Colossus 2 is a hundred acre site, and Musk walked around it at midnight one ight, then again in the morning.
OK forget Tennessee for a minute. Up here, we also have mega-entrepreneurs, looking to build stuff. But we can’t. Not really. Even here in the most business-friendly of provinces, compare the progress Musk is making on his data centre project with anything happening in Alberta.
And this problem in Canada is widely understood and recognized. Our own federal government has created a Major Projects Office in order to streamline approvals, because even Ottawa can see how far we are falling behind. But the problem is how to do anything about it.
Here’s an example, one tortured project that went from the quagmire to the MPO and right back to the quagmire.
In September, the federal government announced funding for the Mackenzie Valley Highway, an 800 kilometre road connecting Quigley and Inuvik in Canada’s arctic. The project is a gravel road across virtually uninhabited territory; it is designed to primarily benefit three communities whose combined population is less than 2,000 people. If you want to get building infrastructure projects, this one is what is known as ‘low hanging fruit’.
This being Canada, the plot of course thickens. You would think that, with full funding from the federal government, and the recognition of the major projects office as a ‘project of national interest’ that needs to be built, the bulldozers would be flying. Well I guess you would think that if you weren’t from these parts.
The project was first referred to the MPO in March of 2026. In September, the feds announced funding, so now we’re 6 months in (from when the project was referred to the MPO…and hold that thought). Next up, the project must receive sign off from the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. In an interview with the CBC in September, the board’s spokesman said that no actual application for them to review had been yet received, and that once it was received, there was no timeline to review it, but that the review process would be completed “in late 2027.”
Late 2027 is at least 1.5 years since the project will have been submitted to the MPO in March of 2026. That is the fast-track program – 18 months before anything is finalized and proponents will know whether they can actually start building.
But the situation is actually much worse. Another CBC article explains: “After two years of lobbying, the N.W.T. government’s effort to secure $700 million in federal funding for the Mackenzie Valley Highway has hit a speed bump.” A NWT Department of Transportation official commented that “the project has basically been put on hold while they do some more consultations and more definitions around federal infrastructure programs.” She pointed to Phase 1 of the federal government’s “long-term infrastructure funding plan”
Wait a minute, you’re probably scratching your head…is this project delayed? And why are they talking about a $700 million project when in September the feds announced it was $400 million?
That’s because the second CBC article about consultation delays is from… 2016. The two years of previous lobbying mean this project has been kicking around since at least 2014. And if all goes well from here, LOL, construction could begin in 2028, or 14 years after efforts to build this highway were first made. With the last two years and counting being ‘fast-tracked’.
As a handy reference point, it took less time to build the entire CPR railway across the country, with 1800s technology.
The problem is structural. The MVEIRB may very well do great work, but it is comprised of FN and federally appointed scientific environmental advisors. So how does the federal government ignore the advice of the panel it put together? Does it start ‘refuting science’ that it put in place? How do you dismantle and disempower these institutions? Because there are many of them, and each has a veto of some sort.
In the past few weeks, Canada has thundered out some for-the-ages proclamations. The federal government unveiled a national strategic plan, The Plan for a Stronger Canada. ‘Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense’ (a reference of supreme irony) the strategic plan is just so emblematic. Canada will pursue a “values-based society” that “will build strategic autonomy and resilience on our own terms” and build a “prosperous, inclusive, innovative economy.”
That’s not exactly the sound of shovels hitting dirt.
Want to hear that sound? You don’t need to track down Elon. Here is Mexico, yes, Mexico, leaving Canada in the dust: the country is racing to connect every major city by train, with 60,000 workers active on 22 fronts, with the army helping out.
And what we don’t need is more bureaucratic thinking. We need action, and the problem is we don’t seem to grasp what that entails in real world terms.
What it means is: Get out of the way. Let people build. Canada has citizens that may not be Elon-level but can certainly move the needle. I know at least twenty such downtown and know of a lot more across the country. It is a mindset that is required, and then unleashed.
Recall from a few paragraphs above: “Macroharder and Minihard both have 220k GB300s with 800 gig nics configured for training. Gun Range will have the same. Spam…will have ~200k GB300s…” Well, he does have a sense of humour: The first two names – Macroharder and Minihard – are apparently tongue-in-cheek digs at Microsoft’s name, and I suppose lack of progress or something…also the MACROHARD logo on the building is big enough to be seen from space, so the guy can execute a joke well enough. The Gun Range AI data centre is being built on the former site of a police training facility. Spam is being constructed in a building that once housed Hormel products, the famous parent of the Spam family of fine meat products.
Speed is of the essence, and Musk uses whatever is available. He built his first data centre in Memphis – Colossus 1, a 174 MW data centre – in 5 months, by utilizing an old Electrolux factory. That is 5 months from start to operational status.
Power is a bottleneck for data centres. Big turbines for power plants to support new data centres are backlogged for years, and were in 2024 as well. So what did Musk do? He brought in dozens of smaller generators and connected them all.
It will take 12 months for the Mackenzie Valley Highway Authority to grant permission to construct a gravel road across the arctic that connects three communities with a population of less than 2,000 people in the hopes of ‘attracting development’.
We’re not even speaking the same language. It is not a people issue; it is not hard at all to find frustrated entrepreneurs. Oh wait, correct that, it is getting harder, because they are leaving. And they’re not leaving for Europe.
That’s the thing about freedom. A population has great amplitude, in every dimension. Some will be criminals, some will scale the highest heights. Some will be caring nurses, some will throw everything on the line and pursue music their entire life. Out of this random imperfect chaos, some people will drag things into existence no one else can imagine, if we set them free.
Bureaucracy and bureaucratic strategies are the antithesis of this. (China is a bit of an exception as a communist bureaucracy, but somehow their leaders figured out that brutal dog-eat-dog competition yields the strongest results, and they implement functional 5 year plans to unleash human ingenuity. Even the commies are better at this than we are.) We haven’t figured out concrete functional planning, and we discourage action by refusing to deal with regulatory strangulation.
We need to think like Elon, not write more strategic vision documents. You may hate him for various reasons, but who cares, we can still attack problems like him. He pursues bottlenecks with a vengeance, and expects every employee to as well. Find the bottleneck, and deal with it. A Musk company builds its own turbine blades, for crying out loud, because turbine blades are the bottleneck in acquiring massive gas turbines to build power pants to build data centres.
Canada needs to instil that discipline and rigour. The number of strategic plans is not the bottleneck. They are irrelevant. The market is telling us what it wants and needs, and we have it.
Oh, and, in reference to yet another strategic vision…the answer does not lie with the EU. Lord help us all.
The holidays are nearly here. Make your loved ones weep with joy, purchase The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity. Read the energy story written for those that don’t live in the energy world, but want to find out. And laugh. Available at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Email Terry here. (His personal energy site, Public Energy Number One, is on hiatus until there are more hours in the day.)