How Canada can break the major project failure loop

Canada’s federal Major Projects Office (MPO) was created to help fast-track major infrastructure projects of national significance. But as we explored in a recent article, high-profile projects across the globe such as Three Gorges Dam in China, the Berlin Brandenburg Airport, the Pascua-Lima Gold-Silver Mine, and the Panama Canal Expansion offer cautionary lessons for the MPO to learn from. 

Some of those projects have become publicly scrutinized case studies revealing cost overruns, schedule delays, and other problems. Even after completion, they continue to shape public confidence in the public sector’s ability to deliver large-scale infrastructure.  

Many of them succumbed to the major projects short-term failure loop: a recurring pitfall characterized by early optimism, deferred decisions, and blurred lines of accountability. Together, they combine to hide the systemic, cumulative risks that push budgets and schedules off-track.

For example, the political optimism during project commissioning that’s shaped by the need to secure approval, momentum, and public support can often lead to unrealistic delivery expectations. If left unchecked, it can undermine delivery discipline and push well-intentioned projects off track in both budget and schedule. This initial framing tends to persist as projects move through planning, design, procurement, and execution. What starts as ambition becomes an operating assumption. 

Against this backdrop, the MPO’s success will hinge not only on approval speed but on whether projects proceed with mature scopes, realistic budgets and schedules, unambiguous accountability, and robust risk assessment and structuring. This means intervening before projects begin to succumb to those drivers of failure. 

5 steps to break the short-term failure loop 

In this context, we define “failure” deliberately and narrowly as delivery breakdowns measured primarily through cost overruns and schedule delays. These are the metrics used to judge major projects during execution. This definition is distinct from broader assessments of long-term strategic or economic value. A project that fails by these measures may ultimately still contribute to national objectives. 

The right governance, processes, and discipline are essential from the outset of each project to ensure that avoidable obstacles are discovered early. The following steps help create the foundations for faster, more credible, and more resilient project execution. 

1. Create a portfolio-level risk register for cross-cutting risks. The MPO should actively maintain a comprehensive risk register that covers risks found in each project sponsored by the MPO. It should focus on systemic risks as well as those that span different project stages and actors such as delays from permitting, cumulative consultation demands from Indigenous and other stakeholders, labor and supply-chain constraints, environmental uncertainty, enabling-infrastructure dependencies, and operational readiness. It should assign clear ownership for each risk and support risk monitoring that continues throughout the project lifecycle, improving alignment with financiers and other stakeholders.
   
   
2. Incorporate independent early-stage challenging and gating into every project. Formal, nonnegotiable, front-end stage gates will allow key independent stakeholders to question assumptions before public commitments are made. These could take the form of external peer review, reference-class forecasting, probability-based cost and schedule ranges, and explicit articulation of later delivery risks before projects receive public approval or announcements about funding. 
   
    
3. Set minimum maturity thresholds for design and scope. These thresholds should be in place before any project begins. They should cover technical definition, regulatory readiness, environmental impact assessment, and feasibility analysis. Projects where such decisions aren’t resolved should be required to determine realistic priced, time-bound options that cover these gaps.
   
   
4. Evaluate procurement for deliverability and risk transparency. Procurement models must be rebalanced to reward realism rather than penalize it. This includes an explicit scoring for risk identification and mitigation quality, and normalizing the scoring of bids against stated risk transfer assumptions. The MPO can reinforce this approach with standardized commercial principles that discourage strategic underbidding and require demonstration of how risks will be priced, governed, and managed.
   
   
5. Assign and empower a system-level integrator role. Each major project should designate a system-level integrator with the authority to manage the interfaces between contractors, jurisdictions, regulators, and lifecycle phases. This role should remain accountable until the project is completed. Where this role can’t sit with a single contractor, the MPO or project sponsor must retain it explicitly and resource it accordingly.

What success ultimately looks like 

The MPO has the opportunity to help strengthen Canada’s long-term economic resilience and global competitiveness. Strategic investments in critical infrastructure can catalyze private capital, create durable high-quality employment, and increase domestic supply chain resilience. 

But this will require a commitment to disciplined execution. Success won’t be measured by faster-moving projects but by whether leaders confront delivery risk early—before short-term failure becomes locked in. 

This is the second in a four-part series exploring challenges facing the MPO, with the first article introducing cautionary lessons from major project failures. Stay tuned for the next one outlining ways for the MPO to prioritize and secure accountability.