Politics Insider: Hodgson makes major projects prediction

The market-relevant signal is not the headline project count; it is the state’s willingness to compress permitting into a quasi-industrial policy tool. That tends to re-rate incumbents with scarce permitted assets because optionality on future projects becomes more valuable when the bottleneck shifts from geology/capex to process and capital allocation. In Canada, that most directly benefits pipeline, gas midstream, electric transmission, uranium, and select miners with shovel-ready inventories, while it quietly hurts late-cycle brownfield competitors that need a cleaner regulatory path to justify growth.

For ENB, the second-order effect is that any faster approvals for upstream gas and power assets improve the throughput case for expansion capex and reduce the duration risk embedded in large capital projects. The biggest upside is not immediate tariff offset or GDP uplift; it is lower probability of stranded capital and better visibility on rate-base or contracted cash flows over 12-36 months. The market may still underappreciate how a federal fast-track regime can improve valuation multiples for assets that are otherwise priced like perpetual regulatory hostage situations.

The fiscal backdrop matters because an improving deficit path gives Ottawa more room to lean into industrial policy without an immediate bond-market penalty. That is supportive for infrastructure and defense-linked spending themes, but it also raises the probability of targeted subsidies rather than broad demand stimulus, which is better for capital goods suppliers than for cyclical consumer exposure. The risk is execution slippage: if only 5-10 projects actually reach FID by spring 2027, the current optimism will fade into a standard Canadian-policy discount, especially if provincial opposition or First Nations litigation slows the pipeline.