[phil21]

You can have all the technical competence in the world, but if those competent people are not allowed to build things your society simply is inept at building stuff in the end. It's a choice society has made.

It's certainly not unique to Canada though. The US and other western societies have made similar choices. Much less risky to employ a lot of expensive people to come up with reasons to not build stuff vs. taking risks and upsetting people by building.

[ttul]

Good points. I would refine my comment: Canada has isolated examples of excellent megaproject execution, but lacks a system that reproduces that performance reliably. The nuclear announcement is credible only insofar as Canada can replicate the OPG/Bruce fleet-program model—stable authority and funding, standardized designs, repeat teams and accumulated learning—rather than its usual election-cycle, one-off megaproject model.

I dearly hope that we're not going to see that model again, but maybe that's likely.