Rob Breakenridge: Mark Carney's pipeline campaign against ... Trudeau - National Post

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks to media in Fort McMurray, Alta., announcing that the Pacific Link pipeline has been listed as a project of national interest, on Thursday, Oct. 1, 2026. Photo by Itoro Umanah /PostmediaArticle contentCALGARY — It’s not a finish line, and it’s been a longer and more complicated process getting to this point than should have been the case, but Thursday’s pipeline announcement is a major milestone, nonetheless.

The declaration that the new west coast pipeline — now known as Pacific Link — is a project of national interest marks not only a big step forward for this vital project, but also a further and significant break from the Trudeau legacy.

Justin Trudeau’s name was absent from Thursday’s press conference, but his policies and his record were, for all intents and purposes, thrown under the bus numerous times — not just by Alberta’s premier, but also by Trudeau’s own successor.

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But, frankly, if we are to meet the ambition of Mark Carney’s rhetoric and build at the “scale and speed” the prime minister now deems necessary, then the more we can shred that legacy, the better.

There’s a political shrewdness in Carney’s recognition of the need to dismantle Trudeau’s signature policies and to defuse the political weapon that those policies created for the Conservatives. In fact, Carney’s pointed words Thursday morning in Fort McMurray were as harsh as any Conservative critique of the last few years.

The prime minister lamented the fact that Canada has become “weighed down by well intentioned, but arduous, often duplicative, regulatory processes,” thus creating an urgency to “do things differently.”

Carney also pointed to the heavy cloud of uncertainty that has deterred major investments. Canada “stopped building,” he said, due to project proponents having to “spend years and potentially billions of dollars doing this work before even knowing where the federal government stood.”

The result, Carney says, was that “for many builders, the risk was not worth it.”