Good morning. In focus today, we look at how Ottawa is delivering big plans that have been a little light on details. Plus, how the key to economic prosperity is hiding in plain sight.

Digital infrastructure: Telus is planning an AI data-centre expansion in B.C., including two new centres in Vancouver.

Real estate: Montreal-based Jesta Group is planning to spend $500-million to buy more than 1,000 newly built Toronto condos and turn them into rentals.

Mining: Barrick chief executive Mark Hill says the company may reach an early agreement with Newmont Corp. to bring its promising Fourmile discovery into their joint venture Nevada Gold Mines.

About a decade ago, Justin Trudeau’s government embraced “deliverology,” a management theory pioneered by Tony Blair’s government in Britain. The idea behind it was to turn promises into results through targets, central tracking and pressure from the centre of government.

Trudeau created a “Results and Delivery Unit” inside the Privy Council Office, had departments name delivery officers, released public mandate letters and created a cabinet committee, chaired by himself, to monitor progress. A mandate-letter tracker later turned that approach into a public checklist of government commitments.

By the end of his first term in 2019, deliverology had faded in the face of criticism that government could create the rituals of delivery before producing delivery itself. Plus, Trudeau was facing the whole SNC-Lavalin thing. What began as a promise of discipline had come to feel like another layer of meetings and reporting. Meh.

Vehicular politics

Mark Carney is not a deliverologist in the Trudeau-era sense. Where Trudeau tried to make delivery visible through targets and trackers, Carney is making action visible through offices, agencies, and advisory committees. The best I can conjure is “vehicular politics” – a cousin of deliverology that emphasizes vessels over metrics – motivated, perhaps like Trudeau before him, by the need to show grip over a government that often struggles to meet the moment.

Since becoming Prime Minister, Carney has announced a parade of new vehicles designed to ease a process or timeline in some way, but each has been criticized for running alongside, on top of, or inside previously existing agencies and infrastructure. They are aimed at the country’s largest economic challenges, and they certainly sound purposeful, but their success will be hard to judge any time soon.

Take the spring update’s plan for a new cabinet minister to oversee defence buying. The Defence Investment Agency Act would make the DIA a standalone legal entity and give the new minister exclusive authority to acquire supplies and services and construct projects, wrote Philippe Lagassé, a Carleton University professor.

That moves the agency out from under Public Services and Procurement Canada, but it also puts a new minister into territory already shaped by National Defence, the Canadian Armed Forces, the Treasury Board, and the department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. In a not-so-distant future, three directors of strategic naval procurement could be arguing over how best to accelerate the same ship.

There’s the major projects office, a keystone of Carney’s election campaign. It was pitched as being a single point of contact for nation-building projects, but the office will work alongside the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada, which already conducts federal reviews of designated major projects and co-ordinates Crown consultation.

Build Canada Homes, another central plank of the Liberal platform, is meant to build affordable housing and act as a one-stop shop for affordable housing. But the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation already occupies the centre of federal housing finance, mortgage funding, research, data and housing programs.

And then there is the Canada Strong Fund, a sovereign wealth fund announced into a crowded field of federal capital tools, including the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund, Export Development Canada, and the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Details, details

For Carney’s plans, it may take years to know whether his agencies have woven themselves into the current system while cutting red tape, building houses, advancing pipelines, raising foreign investment and reducing Canada’s economic reliance on the United States.

But questions are already emerging about how these vehicles will run: The Parliamentary Budget Officer said earlier this month that the government’s spring fiscal update “lacks clarity on major initiatives” including the $25-billion Canada Strong Fund, the defence-spending ramp-up, and the government’s plan to find internal savings.

PBO Annette Ryan also called the lack of targets and metrics around homebuilding and housing supply “notable” (very scathing in Canada) in her report, given that homebuilding and population growth have been on the decline since Carney’s budget was unveiled in early November.

The NDP has criticized Carney for “duplicating the bureaucracy” and argued scarce housing dollars should go to building homes rather than creating another agency.

Shovels at the ready (as a budgetary line item)

If Trudeau and Carney saw the world differently, they shared common instincts to control it: a reputation for micromanagement; a faith, perhaps, that poor-performing government can be fixed by more government; and a belief in governing from the centre out. And from those undoubtedly well-intentioned instincts came a shared risk: that once a prime minister claims a problem as his to solve, it is his to own if he does not.

No one would mistake Carney for Trudeau after visiting his socials, but announcing new architecture to address existential economic issues could be considered an optics play until it’s followed by concrete action.

Still, businesses seem hopeful that Ottawa’s push to accelerate major projects, build trade infrastructure and expand the skilled-trades work force could translate into new demand.