unfortunately yes. Too much bullshits jobs (to suck up funds mostly and critize every aspects of non existant projects) and not enough people to take risks and do the job.

Canada is not an infrastructure “joke.” It is a country with some world-class delivery organizations operating inside a political system that too often destroys continuity. Relative to the G7, that makes it mediocre and volatile, not uniquely incompetent. And, in nuclear specifically, probably no worse positioned than its peers, though the ten-reactor rhetoric is substantially more ambitious than the underlying commitments at this time... (not surprising - it's a politician making an announcement, which is something of a prerequisite for making a "real plan" anyways).

As a Canadian, I think Canada’s primary hurdle is not a lack of engineering competence, but rather political volatility. Projects like Calgary’s Green Line often suffer from shifting scopes, fragmented authority, and delayed funding. Conversely, the recent Darlington nuclear plant refurbishment finished early and under budget. This proves that Canada can successfully execute megaprojects when planning is front-loaded and standardized.

Another comment I'd make is that the Carney government is only just a bit more than one year old. They're writing a whole lot of new policy. Will they succeed more than past governments? Who knows. But, at least they're spending the majority of their political capital trying to build stuff.

Federal funding for the green line was announced in 2015, and IIRC they originally predicted a 2026 opening date for branches covering the north and south of the city - street running in the north central part and a bit in Seton, a short tunnel downtown, and dedicated ROW elsewhere. This was back when planners were still really into streetcars/trams. The funding mix was supposed to be $1.5 billion each from the city, province and feds.

The city sat on their hands for years, perfecting and re-routing the downtown part[1]. Eventually, the plan was shortened to 16 Ave N to Shepard with a long tunnel downtown. The city ordered $100s of millions of low-floor trains, incompatible with the existing ones, necessitating building a new maintenance facility. The cost at this point was $5.something billion.

Then, in 2020, the provincial government put a "pause" on the project. When it came back to life, costs had increased dramatically, and the city came out with a modified plan the (the $6.8 billion stub train from downtown to Lynnwood). The province then threatened to pull their part of the funding, and commissioned a new downtown segment plan that advocated for elevated downtown, and nothing north of there.

Today? We are building the original truncated south phase to Shepard (by 2031!), but not the downtown part. The city is still debating what's going to happen downtown, dismissing elevated. They are hearing from office building and parking lot owners who are worried about its effect on property values, but I think they are also rejecting any ideas from the province on principle. About the only positive thing I can say is that the project is tangibly under construction now, with actual bridges over roadways done or nearly complete.

I blame the city (both planners and elected officials) and the province in that order, but mostly the city.

[1] One positive thing to come from that is the routing in Inglewood/Ramsay and 26 Ave SE that avoids taking down heritage buildings and destroying a vital community corridor.

Unfortunately its just a small boiling water reactor. More capacity is needed in most parts of the world. Lager reactors are needed.

The claim that Alberta is actively trying to get rid of all wind and solar development is internet hyperbole that ignores real capacity data. Alberta actually ranks second in Canada for clean energy growth, and its renewable output surged by over 25% year-over-year into 2026.

The high-profile project cancellations people point to weren't a government ban. They happened because the province changed its transmission rules. Previously, ratepayers subsidized the massive utility costs required to connect remote wind and solar farms to the central grid. The province ended this, forcing private developers to internalize their own grid connection costs. Once forced to pay for their own infrastructure, highly speculative, unfinanced projects simply became economically unviable and dropped out of the queue.

If a private wind or solar developer wanted to build a massive farm in a remote, rural area (like Southern Alberta) where land is cheap but high-voltage power lines do not exist, they only had to pay for the immediate wire connecting their project to the nearest local substation. Taxpayers were subsidizing those players, because it was a "load pays" system.

Please do not fall pray to the general trope that Alberta is a backwards hillbilly province. Subsidizing private developments with public money is not something that should be encouraged.

On Canada broadly, you are correct in your baseload numbers and I agree with you.

(Energy trader here)

15 years, to be clear.

Always amused me that on the face of things, a CANDU looks just like a sideways RBMK. At least in terms of plumbing. There's clearly more to it than that.

>15 seems...ambitions, but if we're going to spend at a federal level this is probably one of the better things to invest in.

If they can make them cookie cutter as much as possible and not unique snowflakes like has been the pattern at least in the US, they can probably do it both on the timeline and a somewhat reasonable cost basis

If they build 15 individual projects instead of managing this as a single big project, yeah that is very ambitious

> Should look at the the historical record and consider the scale of cost overruns and delays that major nuclear projects have experienced. While everyone involved may have good intentions, the reality is that these projects often end up costing significantly more and taking much longer than originally projected.

Canada has also regularly refurbished their CANDU reactors, which are large multi year projects. And they do it on-time and under budget

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/renewed-bruce-3-...

How viable is Solar in Canada given its weather? (I am ignorant about it and only know that it's really cold and cloudy most of the time).

Australia is really good for solar, why build nuclear?