What Canada can learn from major project challenges across the globe

In 2025, Canada established the federal Major Projects Office (MPO) to identify and expedite projects of national significance in energy, critical minerals, transportation, and trade corridors. These types of cross-jurisdictional projects can produce significant long-term impact by catalyzing new industries, creating durable employment, unlocking value chains, and supporting sustainable economic growth.  

The MPO was created to streamline approvals, coordinate across jurisdictions, and help attract capital. The aim is to move priority projects from concept to construction more quickly and reliably to build a stronger, more resilient economy. Strengthening domestic infrastructure and supply chains should reduce Canada’s exposure to external shocks, supply disruptions, and geopolitical influence.

The logic underpinning the MPO’s role is sound—but global experience shows that more than cross-jurisdictional coordination and regulatory streamlining is needed. Leaders throughout the world have repeatedly missed fundamental issues discovered after projects have been approved. These include misaligned incentives, unresolved governance ambiguities, immature project definitions, capacity constraints, and optimistic assumptions around risk. 

Late discovery of these types of issues often causes schedule creep, cost overruns, scope degradation, and erosion of stakeholder confidence. To fully realize MPO goals and achieve success, leaders will need to directly address these structural and execution-level risks from the start. 

Cautionary lessons from major infrastructure projects 

Clear lessons can be taken from independent audits and post‑mortem analyses of several high‑profile megaprojects, including the Three Gorges Dam in China, Muskrat Falls in Canada, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, High-Speed Rail 2 in the UK, the Olkiluoto-3 Nuclear Power Plant, the Pascua-Lima Gold-Silver Mine, and the Panama Canal Expansion.  

While each project’s scope and execution have differed, they’ve shared a few strikingly consistent challenges, including: 

Optimism bias reinforced by political imperatives. The need to secure approval, momentum, and public acceptance shapes initial delivery commitments and obscures realistic expectations. Cost, schedule, and risk assumptions are locked in too early, reducing the options available later in the project. 

Scope change driven by late decisions and weak change control. When work begins before scope has matured to a credible level for the project stage—often due to political or scheduling pressures—leaders tend to defer decisions about scope. Changes resulting from those delayed decisions compound complexity, disrupt proper sequencing, and steadily erode public credibility. 

Competitive procurement that hides risk instead of pricing it. Encouraging procurement bids that are aggressively competitive on cost or schedule often rewards optimism, not realism. Strategic underbidding ignores structural and execution-level risk and obscures the true cost of delivery until the project has progressed beyond most viable corrective options. 

Lack of a lead integrator and clear accountability governance. Structuring delivery models that distribute responsibility across multiple contractors and public entities often means there’s no single entity with authority over system‑level integration. Interfaces between technical, commercial, and regulatory functions are left unmanaged until failures surface late in delivery. 

Systemic and indirect costs hidden by poor risk structuring. Risks that span institutions, systems, and project phases are frequently underestimated or left without clear ownership. These include permitting, integration, operational readiness, stakeholder alignment, and environmental impacts. Pressure to speed up approvals can leave these cumulative risks hidden instead of resolved. 

These elements frequently arise from the approval phase, when leaders spurred by political urgency and optimism prioritize momentum over realistic planning. Early pressures shape later decisions on design development, procurement structures, accountability governance, and risk assessment. 

As several elements compound each other, they create a reinforcing failure loop across the full project lifecycle—with each round of decisions undermining the next. By the time these issues fully come to light, projects can be locked into trajectories where deferred risks reappear as delays, cost escalation, loss of confidence, and irreversible impacts. 


 

Breaking the short-term failure loop 

To avoid these challenges, speed must be tempered with discipline by prioritizing robust risk mitigation, clear ownership, and credible controls from the beginning. MPO leaders must balance the desire to fast-track projects of national interest with the need to guard against the very short-term pressures that have weakened major project outcomes in the past. Breaking the failure loop will require discipline to choose, structure, and govern projects differently as well as practical mechanisms that connect project selection, delivery, and accountability to durable national value.

This is the first in a four-part series exploring how the MPO can create significant impact through a best-practices journey. Future articles will address ways to break the major project failure loop, incorporate governance as a core delivery function, and institute the four primary drivers of enduring project success.