Building Roads for Companies, Not Communities: What Canada's Budget Gets Wrong

Canada's latest budget promises "historic infrastructure investment" and a path out of economic stagnation. But look closer at where the money actually flows, and a different picture emerges: we're not building national prosperity — we're subsidizing its export.

I understand the appeal of fast-tracking resource projects when you're staring at sluggish growth and mounting deficits. On the surface, it offers momentum — a brief flash of revenue, a bump in GDP, the sense that "something is finally happening." But that lift is shallow and short-lived.

Once the dust settles, we're left even further behind, because accelerating extraction in a country that already exports its wealth for pennies only drains what little advantage we have left.

This is not the moment to double down on gutting what remains of Canada's natural inheritance. It's the moment to pivot toward creation-based models — the kind used by Nordic nations, where public ownership and value-added industries have built sovereign wealth funds worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per citizen.

Norway's fund holds over US$300,000 per citizen, not because they extracted faster, but because they captured the value, processed it domestically, and reinvested the profits at home.

Canada could do the same — but only if we stop selling what's left of the country at a discount, and start building prosperity instead of exporting it.

When "Infrastructure" Means Something Else Entirely

People hear "historic investments in infrastructure" and assume it means repairing crumbling roads, modernizing aging water systems, and building the affordable housing, transit, and public facilities communities actually need. That's not what this budget is doing.

Most of the money is being funneled into industrial and resource-enabling infrastructure — the roads, ports, terminals, supply corridors, and northern access routes that make extraction faster, cheaper, and easier for private capital. It's infrastructure designed to move minerals, LNG, and bulk commodities out of the country, not to strengthen the communities those resources come from.

The public hears "nation-building." Investors hear "export-facilitating."

Canadians imagine new hospitals and safer bridges. What they're actually getting is deep-water ports for shipping raw ore and all-season roads built primarily to service mega-projects. It looks like investment because the dollar amounts are huge, but the long-term public value is thin. It looks like investment. It functions as subsidy.

You don't build national prosperity by subsidizing the logistical backbone of foreign-controlled extraction. You build it by investing in infrastructure that multiplies public wealth — clean transit, housing, broadband, climate resilience, education, local manufacturing capacity. Nordic countries became wealthy by building infrastructure that supports people and productivity, not pipelines and profit corridors.

Until Canada stops confusing "infrastructure for extraction" with "infrastructure for society," we'll keep paying for projects that move our resources out faster while leaving our communities stuck with the same broken systems.

We've Tried This Before. It Doesn't Work.

These are the same policies that got Canada into this mess in the first place — pouring public money into infrastructure that serves extraction, not communities. For decades we've built roads, ports, and corridors designed to move our resources out of the country faster, while our own cities, water systems, housing stock, and public services fell apart.

It's the same pattern every time: subsidize the export economy, neglect the domestic one, and hope the benefits "trickle back" someday. They never do.

Yes, resource jobs matter. But jobs that extract and export aren't the same as jobs that build and retain value. A worker shipping raw logs overseas creates temporary employment. A worker in a domestic mill, turning those logs into finished products, creates wages, skills, secondary industries, and long-term community stability. One model empties the vault. The other fills it.

Repeating this pattern under the banner of "nation-building" won't fix Canada's problems — it just accelerates the very dynamics that created them.

What an Actual Pivot Would Look Like

If Canada pivots — toward public ownership, value-added industry, Indigenous co-governance, domestic reinvestment, and creation-based economic models — the trajectory changes fast.

In year one, we stop selling Crown resources at fire-sale prices and start demanding equity stakes, processing requirements, and community benefit agreements. We build refineries, mills, and manufacturing hubs instead of export terminals. We route resource revenues into a sovereign wealth fund that compounds for future generations instead of evaporating into quarterly earnings reports for foreign shareholders.

We invest in the infrastructure Canadians actually need: social housing that stabilizes communities, public transit that connects workers to opportunity, renewable energy grids that lower costs and build resilience, broadband that reaches every rural community. We treat Indigenous nations as governing partners with decision-making power, not obstacles to be consulted and bypassed.

We stop measuring success by how fast we can ship things out, and start measuring it by how much value we keep, reinvest, and build.

This isn't a fantasy. Norway did it. So did Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. They didn't get rich by racing to the bottom — they got rich by capturing the full value of what they had and refusing to let others walk away with it.

The Fork in the Road

Canada stands at a decision point. We can continue down the path we've been on — subsidizing extraction, calling it growth, watching our wealth disappear across borders while our communities deteriorate — or we can choose the harder, smarter route that every successful resource-rich nation eventually takes: own it, process it, invest it, keep it.

If we don't pivot now, we end up exactly where the current policies are pointing: a nation with everything to offer and nothing left to show for it. A country that spent a generation building roads for companies instead of futures for Canadians.

True nation-building doesn't mean building infrastructure that moves our resources out faster. It means building a foundation that lets Canadians keep what's theirs, and build something that lasts.