Prioritizing clear governance for Canada’s major projects

When a major project of national significance falters, determining what went wrong is a logical, essential task. One critical question to ask is, “Who could have prevented this?” Inquiries and audits into major project failures in Canada and around the world repeatedly point to the same causes. It’s not that the risks were unknowable; it’s that no one established clear responsibility for recognizing, escalating, and acting responsibly on those risks. Project governance may have nominally assigned accountability at the outset—but in practice, nobody took ownership of that function. This means that avoidable risks were allowed to develop into cost overruns, delays, or operational breakdowns. 

The Canadian experience has sometimes followed this pattern. Our review of major urban transit, energy, and infrastructure projects shows that governance becomes more challenging when schedule pressures and political imperatives converge. And this intensifies when no one is sure where authority lies for making decisions, escalating risk, and demonstrating or communicating readiness. When the desire to satisfy optimistic projections and quickly advance decisions outweighs the need to test underlying assumptions and set clear governance, the resulting problems have negative long-term effects on public confidence. 

How unclear accountability sabotages major projects 

In some cases, transit systems have been put into service without resolving known technical or safety issues. This reflects a lack of ability by oversight bodies to intervene decisively as well as ambiguity about who holds the authority to pause or redirect project delivery.  

In other instances, who’s responsible for these issues is only revealed after the results have become irreversible. Problems often spring from governance choices made at project approval rather than during delivery. Did early estimates accurately reflect areas of uncertainty? Were risks communicated and examined independently? Our reviews point to a number of factors affecting these critical concerns. 

Political optimism can lead to people being unwilling or unempowered to question assumptions, decisions, or forecasts. It can also contribute to approval processes that give more weight to moving forward than to testing underlying assumptions.  

Another factor is insufficient early risk assessment that compromises true accountability, especially in situations where government officials push for project completion despite the advisability of cancellation. When project leaders fail to account for low-probability, high-impact risks (particularly geotechnical conditions), the ensuing budget resets and schedule delays can have a negative impact on institutional reputation and credibility—even for projects that eventually deliver long-term national value. 

The question of accountability becomes even more important when ownership and fiscal risk converge. As costs rise and assumptions shift, concerns increase that construction costs could end up exceeding the asset’s final value. Attention then moves upstream as authorities scrutinize how business cases have been reassessed over time and who has been responsible for the continued investment despite changing conditions. 

Prioritizing governance over ambition 

Successful project outcomes hinge less on ambition and more on whether governance is strong enough to compel realism, clarify decision rights, and uncover inconvenient information early. Optimism bias and political pressure will always be present for these projects. The critical question is whether the governance put in place has the strength and authority to counterbalance them when it matters most. 

For the MPO, the message is hard to ignore: Assigning true accountability must be part of every project. The lessons are well-documented—and the window to act on them is in the project development phase before choices have narrowed. 

The 4 principles for major project accountability 

As Canada’s sole federal convenor and accelerator for major projects, the MPO is tasked with centralizing coordination, visibility, and influence in ways that few governance models have achieved. Its challenge isn’t to simply accelerate delivery; it’s also to actively avoid the governance failures that have historically turned complexity into crisis. Speed achieved at the cost of less scrutiny, blurred ownership, and failure to challenge optimistic assumptions only magnifies long-term institutional risk.  

By discovering issues earlier, aligning decision-making, and clarifying accountability at critical moments, the MPO can ensure that governance is a core delivery function anchored in the following practical principles: 

1. Accountability must be explicit. Decision rights, escalation thresholds, and ownership must be clearly defined across scope, schedule, cost, operational readiness, and risk disclosure—with no ambiguity about responsibility for action when limits are exceeded. 
2. Expectations must be realistic. Cost and schedule expectations should be grounded in comparative, external benchmarks and expressed as transparent ranges rather than as single, fixed targets that are likely to change. 
3. Operational readiness must serve as a governance stage gate. Governance decision points should depend on systems integration, testing, and end-to-end readiness—not regarded as late-stage technical milestones to be addressed after commitments are made. 
4. Transparency must span the entire project lifecycle. Regular, standardized reporting and independent assurance help uncover emerging issues early enough for corrections to be made while meaningful options still exist. 

As demonstrated by major project challenges throughout Canada and across the globe, accountability must be designed into governance from the outset. The Canadian public has a long-term memory for projects that go awry. Success won’t be judged solely by how many projects the MPO advances but by whether accountability is in place early enough to prevent failure from becoming systemic.  

This is the third in a four-part series exploring challenges facing the MPO, with the first article introducing cautionary lessons from major project failures and the second describing ways to break the major projects failure loop. The final article will outline how the MPO can support and advance major projects that leave a lasting legacy.