Bill C-39 and the One-Year Clock: What the Building Canada Strong Act Would Change for Impact Assessment Practice

Bill C-39, the Building Canada Strong Act, passed second reading in the House of Commons on 8 October 2026 by a vote of 296 to 26 and is now before a dedicated legislative committee. That committee is accepting written briefs until 5:00 p.m. Eastern on 26 October 2026 — one brief per individual or organisation. For anyone who works in federal impact assessment, that is a short window on a bill that would change how assessments are structured, who conducts them, and when the clock starts running.

The bill is large. Introduced on 21 September 2026 under the long title An Act respecting certain measures to strengthen the economy, it runs to three Parts covering project evaluations, supply chains and the federal workforce. Most of it has nothing to do with impact assessment. Part 1 has a great deal to do with it, and amends the Impact Assessment Act, the Building Canada Act, the Canadian Energy Regulator Act, the Canadian Navigable Waters Act, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, 1999, the Species at Risk Act and the Fisheries Act.

The government describes the objective as "one project, one consultation, one year," and frames it as a change in federal process rather than federal standards. Whether that framing holds is the question practitioners will be working through for the next several years. Four changes matter most for day-to-day practice.

1. One decision statement, carrying the permits with it

Under the bill, the Minister of the Environment could grant certain federal authorisations at the same time as issuing the decision statement for a designated project. A new schedule to the Act would list the authorisations capable of being bundled this way — including instruments that currently sit with separate departments under the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act and the Canadian Navigable Waters Act. The government's own description of the new approach is a single federal decision followed by a single conditions document.

For practice, this collapses a sequence that most project teams currently run partly in parallel and partly in series: the impact assessment, then the downstream authorisations, each with its own information requirements, its own technical reviewers and its own conditions. Bundling them means those information requirements now have to be satisfied up front, together, and consistently. A habitat offsetting plan that was formerly developed after a decision statement becomes part of the package that produces the decision statement.

2. A different assessor for some project types

The bill would make the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission responsible for the impact assessment of designated projects involving activities regulated under the Nuclear Safety and Control Act, allowing the impact assessment decision and the licensing decision to proceed together. On the energy side, the Canada Energy Regulator would become the sole assessor for designated pipelines, certain power lines and certain offshore renewable energy projects, with decisions required within one year of receiving the required information and studies, and with Cabinet determining public interest for certain pipelines and power lines.

In practical terms, for those project classes the integrated review panel model is replaced by the lifecycle regulator acting alone. The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada retains the remaining designated projects — mines, dams, ports and similar undertakings.

3. The one-year clock, and where it actually starts

The headline commitment is that a decision statement must be issued within one year. The operative words in the bill's own summary are that the year runs from the point at which "the proponent provides the required information or studies."

The Cabinet Directive on Getting Projects Built in Canada, issued alongside the bill, sets out a sequence in which proponents assemble a comprehensive application first, a coordinated Crown consultation process runs, and then one federal decision and one conditions document follow, with construction able to begin at the end. The published description of that sequence commits to no more than one year from submission to federal decision.

The effect is front-end loading. Time is not removed from the process so much as moved to a phase where it is less visible and less constrained. Legal commentary on the bill has also noted that mechanisms to suspend or extend timelines remain available, including where additional consultation is required, so a one-year statutory target and a one-year elapsed review are not the same thing. Practitioners should expect the determination that an application is complete to become one of the more consequential moments in the process, and should expect disagreement about it.

4. A feasibility test on conditions

Several of the amendments introduce a common requirement: that the feasibility of conditions be considered before they are imposed. The bill applies versions of this to approvals under the Canadian Navigable Waters Act and to certain agreements and permits under the Species at Risk Act, alongside related changes to the Fisheries Act habitat banking regime that would permit third-party use of habitat credits and allow prescribed fees in lieu of offsetting, credited to the Environmental Damages Fund.

This is a meaningful change in how mitigation gets justified. A condition that is environmentally defensible but costly has, until now, been argued primarily on environmental grounds. Under a feasibility test, the record supporting a proposed condition needs a cost and constructability dimension as well. That cuts both ways: proponents will need credible feasibility evidence to resist conditions, and regulators will need it to impose them.

Regions of national interest

The bill also builds out the Building Canada Act with a framework for certain projects located in a designated region of national interest, parallel to the existing framework for national interest projects. A region would be added to a new schedule by the Governor in Council, with regional assessment work contemplated ahead of designation, and qualifying projects would then move through a streamlined path toward a single approval document. The bill would also allow conditions on authorisations already granted to be added, removed or amended before a project is listed.

For impact assessment practice, this is the most interesting provision in the bill, because it is the one that could actually move the needle on cumulative effects. Regional assessment has been underused in Canada. Tying it to a designation that confers downstream procedural benefit gives it a purpose it has lacked. Whether that materialises depends entirely on the quality and scope of the regional assessments that precede designation — and on whether regional assessment is treated as the analytical foundation for the designation or as a procedural step on the way to it. No regions have been designated.

Consultation coordination

The bill coordinates impact assessments, federal authorisation reviews and consultation with Indigenous groups, with a Crown Consultation Hub within the Impact Assessment Agency intended to deliver one coordinated consultation process per project per Indigenous community. The Crown's duty to consult is not altered by the bill, and remains subject to judicial review.

Two observations are worth recording without overstating them. First, coordination and compression are not the same thing: a single consultation process is an improvement over several uncoordinated ones only if it is adequately resourced and if it preserves the opportunity to raise concerns as project information matures. Second, the bill's text does not reference the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, although the engagement materials that preceded the bill did. The federal engagement process behind the bill ran from 8 May to 22 July 2026 and attracted more than 26,000 submissions; how that record is reflected at committee stage is now the live question.

What to do about it

For proponents and practitioners with federal projects in or near the queue:

• Treat the pre-application phase as the assessment. If the statutory clock begins at completeness, the work that determines schedule happens before the clock starts. Baseline design, information requirement negotiation and engagement sequencing become the schedule drivers.
• Map the bundled authorisations early. Identify which downstream federal permits a project will need and confirm whether they fall within the schedule of authorisations capable of being issued with the decision statement. Those information requirements move forward in time.
• Build feasibility evidence alongside mitigation design. Where conditions are proposed, expect to support or contest them with technical, economic and practical feasibility analysis, not environmental rationale alone.
• Do not assume one year means one year. Plan against the statutory target, but model the extension and suspension pathways.
• Watch the regional assessment pipeline. If regions of national interest are designated, the regional assessments supporting them will set the cumulative effects baseline that individual projects inherit.

The pendulum, again

Canada's federal impact assessment regime has not evolved in a straight line. It has swung between efficiency and trust for five decades — EARP, CEAA 1995, CEAA 2012, the Impact Assessment Act, the 2023 Supreme Court reference, the 2024 amendments, the Building Canada Act. Bill C-39 is a pronounced swing toward efficiency, and it arrives with broad parliamentary support rather than over objection.

The design question is not whether to choose speed or legitimacy. It is whether a faster process can be built on an evidentiary and consultative foundation solid enough that its decisions hold — in the courts, with rights holders, and with the public. The committee stage is where that gets tested. Briefs are due 26 October 2026.

Primary sources for this article are Parliament of Canada, LEGISinfo, Bill C-39 (45-1), including the official summary of the bill as introduced and the record of the second reading vote of 8 October 2026 (Vote 178: 296–26, 10 paired); the news release of the Legislative Committee on Bill C-39 of 9 October 2026 setting the brief deadline and submission requirements; and the Government of Canada's announcement of the Cabinet Directive on Getting Projects Built in Canada of 21 September 2026. Legal commentary consulted in preparing this note includes bulletins from McMillan LLP, Gowling WLG, JFK Law and Norton Rose Fulbright. Nothing here is legal advice.