In February 2026, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith addressed the province with a clear message: “We will not permit Alberta’s, and Canada’s, most valuable resource deposit, worth almost $10 trillion dollars, to remain in the ground to the detriment of millions of Canadians. That’s not going to happen.” At the time, the Pacific Link Pipeline (then referred to as the West Coast Oil Pipeline) was still quietly winding its way through initial planning.
Eight months later, under the banner of the Building Canada Act (Bill C-39), the push to construct the Pacific Link Pipeline across Western Canada was shifted into overdrive. Promoted as an urgent necessity for national economic development, the legislation creates accelerated review timelines that operationalize Smith’s mandate to unlock the multi-trillion-dollar oil deposit in under a year.
The goal of this compressed timeline? Shovels in the ground by September 2027. The governments expect to assess, consult, and approve a 1,200-kilometer megaproject affecting hundreds of Indigenous Nations, major municipal centers, and complex watersheds in just 11 months. The tactical adage says smooth is slow, and slow is fast – meaning that taking the time to do things right the first time prevents catastrophic delays down the road. As this multi-billion-dollar review is forcibly sprinting to its due date, there’s a real risk of crucial ecological, engineering, and community details being dropped or skipped to meet the deadline.
By drastically compressing the space for environmental oversight and Nation-to-Nation dialogue in the name of economic speed, the act makes clear that the project’s momentum will not be permitted to stall, mirroring Alberta Premier’s warning that leaving these resources unextracted is simply not going to happen. The governmental approach to build a new pipeline as quickly as possible will inevitably create the space for predictable vulnerabilities, inviting legal challenges and regulatory shutdowns that will waste taxpayer dollars and potentially stall the Pacific Link construction for years.
This fast-tracking strategy relies on a convenient framing of the federal and provincial authorities as neutral managers rushing through a “group project,” while stripping Indigenous Nations of the time and resources required to assess the cumulative impacts of yet another pipeline carved through their territories. Artificially compressing these timelines guarantees a rushed, low-quality consultation process, making meaningful dialogue nearly impossible, let alone achieving true Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC). In practice, regulators will treat consultation as a box-checking exercise while bypassing genuine consent altogether, even if a handful of supportive Nations sign on.
A release from the office of the Prime Minister states that the Major Projects Office, which will lead on the Pacific Link planning, is satisfied with the consultation that took place over two months with over 130 Indigenous Nations. But consultation is not consent. Rushing resource development without genuine consent mirrors the non-consensual land access that has defined Canada’s colonial history since the Doctrine of Discovery. The only way for this project to move forward without perpetuating that colonial legacy is to seek and secure FPIC. Without it, the project should not move forward.
The Assembly of First Nations in BC clearly rejected the logic behind Bill C-39, stating:
“First Nations rights and responsibilities are inseparable from the health of the lands, water, fish, wildlife, and ecosystems that have sustained First Nations peoples since time immemorial. Accelerating project approvals cannot mean weakening the safeguards intended to protect them.”
Rushing long-term fossil fuel infrastructure during an escalating climate crisis is also a dangerous contradiction. Claiming that fast-tracking heavy extraction positions Canada as a “clean energy leader” doesn’t change the physics of climate change: chasing short-term gains locks us all into decades of higher emissions and legal uncertainty.
Cutting corners creates drawn-out legal battles, community disruption, and environmental degradation–costs that are ultimately borne by all Canadians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.
