The Quiet Cost of Slow Permits

Public debates about infrastructure almost always start with money. How much will the project cost? Who pays? What does the province contribute, and what does Ottawa match? These are fair questions, but they crowd out a quieter variable that often matters more: time.

Delay is a cost, even when nothing is spent

A project that takes eight years to approve and four years to build is, in economic terms, a twelve-year project. Every year of delay pushes back the benefits — the transit riders not carried, the housing not occupied, the grid capacity not added — while the costs of planning, legal review, and consultation accumulate quietly in the background.

The most expensive infrastructure project is often the one that exists only as a filing cabinet of environmental assessments.

This is not an argument against review. Environmental assessment, Indigenous consultation, and municipal input exist for good reasons, and skipping them produces worse projects and longer litigation. The argument is narrower: duration is a design choice within those processes, and most jurisdictions have never treated it as one.

Three places timelines hide

When you look for where time actually goes, three patterns recur:

• Sequential review. Agencies that could review in parallel instead review in sequence, each waiting for the previous file to close.
• Open-ended information requests. Without a deadline discipline, each round of questions restarts the clock.
• Litigation buffers. Proponents pad schedules for expected judicial review, and the padding becomes self-fulfilling.

None of these requires weaker standards to fix. Parallel review, binding response windows, and clearer statutory language are process reforms, not deregulation.

What a serious timeline policy looks like

A credible reform agenda would publish approval-time data by project class, set enforceable service standards for each review stage, and require agencies to explain — publicly — any file that exceeds them. Sunlight on duration does for process what budgets do for spending: it makes the trade-offs visible and forces someone to own them.

Speed is not the enemy of rigour. Unexamined slowness is the enemy of both.