A Region That Can’t Get Its (Many) Acts Together
Fragmented rules, political resets, and slow permitting have created a region where capital comes to look but rarely stays to build
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Cathy Bennett doesn’t need statistics to explain what is wrong with Atlantic Canada’s pitch to investors. She describes it like a contractor’s quote. A savvy homebuyer wouldn’t hire a contractor to build a house without some price assurance, an agreed deadline and appropriate permit planning.
Likewise, if a government or community prices a project but then cannot maintain that price – because the permitting slipped, or an election changed the framework, or four jurisdictions each want their own process ,altering the timeframe – then that deal is lost, she explains. Worse, the investor’s decision to spend time in the region is lost.
As a longtime business owner, former Newfoundland and Labrador finance minister, co-founder of Sandpiper Ventures and current member of the Atlantic Economic Panel, Bennett has spent years watching capital approach the region and then quietly redirect.
Jurisdictional mathematics
Atlantic Canada is not a single market. It is four provincial markets, layered with federal authority and overlaid again by municipal permitting. For a large-scale investor, that arithmetic is not just complex. It is a reason to look elsewhere.
The region’s deeper problem is repetition without learning. Large-scale deals have been too infrequent to build institutional fluency, says Bennett. Every project starts from scratch; each negotiation is bespoke.
“We don’t have the muscle memory across the region or the frequency of experiences to get that flow of predictability for investors,” she says. Infrastructure capital operates on 20- to 30-year horizons; political cycles run to four. A framework built in one term may not survive the next.
“Does this strategy hold for 15 years?” is not a rhetorical question. For investors committing long-dated capital, it is the central one.
The execution gap
Atlantic Canada’s fiscal constraint is simple. The four provinces do not generate enough tax revenue to pay for the services their populations need. Recent provincial budgets tell the tale.
New Brunswick
$1.39 billion deficit
$15.9 billion debt
30.6 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio
Prince Edward Island - 2026-27 budget will be released this afternoon (March 24)
$367 million (December 2025 fiscal update)
$3.7 billion debt
38 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio
Nova Scotia
$1.2 billion deficit
$27.9 billion debt
39.4 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio
Newfoundland and Labrador (from December fiscal update)
$948 million deficit
$19.4 billion debt (2025-26)
44.4 per cent debt-to-GDP ratio (highest in Canada)
To close these gaps, the four Atlantic provinces need large-scale investments. But that investment has been consistently hard to attract. The result is a loop: without growth, there is no revenue; without revenue, there is no capacity to support the conditions that attract growth.
What’s missing is scalability, which in practice means execution. Are the physical, human and societal conditions in place to move projects forward at the pace investors require? Has the region made clear to investors what it actually intends to be known for? If Atlantic Canada wants to be an energy region, a mining region, a green technology region, or all three, that requires a strategy visible enough for capital to align behind it, Bennett argues.
Bennett is precise about a confusion that costs the region deals: operators and investors are not the same thing. A province may have ambitious operators who cannot attract capital. The government’s role is not to replace the investor, but to create the conditions that make operators investable.
“Does the province push them to be an operator that can attract capital?” she asks. The question is not what provinces can afford to spend. It is what environment they are capable of building.
Exporters or value-adders
Beneath these constraints sits a more fundamental choice. Is Atlantic Canada in the business of exporting its natural assets, or building value from them? These are, Bennett emphasizes, two entirely different strategies and they will define the region’s economic trajectory.
The export model is familiar. Timber leaves as logs. Energy, if developed at scale, will likely leave as electrons bound for New England. Value is realised elsewhere.
The alternative is more demanding. A value-add strategy requires something four provincial governments with separate mandates and four-year attention spans have never managed to build: a coordinated industrial supply chain.
Bennett’s vision is specific: green steel from Labrador, processed into aluminium in New Brunswick, manufactured into components used by Michelin in Nova Scotia.
“How do we coordinate the strategies?” she asks. At present, there is no mechanism to do so. The Atlantic Loop, a transmission project central to the region’s energy integration, illustrates the gap. Its importance is widely acknowledged; its progress remains stalled in negotiations.
The fiscal logic is direct. Driving up provincial GDP through raw extraction, while value leaves the region, produces revenues that look respectable in aggregate and feel inadequate per capita. “We like to think that because there’s an asset, there’s an implied revenue, and there isn’t,” Bennett says. ”If nobody buys it, there is no revenue.”
Building purchase agreements and demonstrated demand into the investment case from the start is not a detail. It is the strategy.
Friction: Rubbed the wrong way
Nowhere is this execution gap more visible than in emerging sectors. “Regulatory velocity” a term common to venture capital, measures how quickly regulatory frameworks evolve relative to the industries they govern. Lags in regulatory velocity create ‘friction,’ and when technology outpaces regulation, it creates uncertainty. When friction rises, investors cannot model risk and capital moves on to greener, smoother pastures.
Regulatory standards, despite their stubborn intergovernmental abundance, should not be misinterpreted as negative. Bennett, for instance, does not want to strip out regulation.
“Canada is recognised as being one of the most progressive regulated communities to do work in,” she says. Regulations mean safety, fairness, rule of law, financial governance and social licence. Our difficulty is coordination.
Change is afoot, Bennett says. Nova Scotia has eliminated 150 of 300 regulations. New Brunswick has built a mining framework. Newfoundland is working on health sector regulation. Progress is real.
The spirit is willing
Atlantic Canada’s marine carbon removal sector demonstrates the friction problem right now. Planetary Technologies, a Halifax company, leads the world in ocean alkalinity enhancement: adding minerals to coastal waters to capture and store atmospheric carbon. It delivers verified carbon credits through Frontier, a carbon removal purchasing alliance backed by Google, Stripe, and Shopify. Unfortunately for Atlantic Canada, its technology is advancing faster than the frameworks that govern it.
More than five federal bodies oversee Planetary Technologies’ operations, including Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Transport Canada, and the Impact Assessment Agency. Each applies different statutes to the same activity.
The result is not oversight, but overlap. Investors struggle to model timelines and risk. In such conditions, delay is not neutral. It is decisive.
In February 2026, the Senate committee’s report, “Carbon Removal, From Air to Sea,” recommended a single regulatory sandbox to consolidate federal oversight, targeting a unified framework by end-2027. The risk is timing.
By 2027, the commercial market may have moved on. Capital does not wait for regulatory alignment; it prices delay as risk.
Still, the recommendation signals movement. The regulatory sandbox, introduced in Budget 2024 as a government-wide tool, is intended to let frameworks evolve alongside emerging sectors. In principle, it could apply to tidal energy, offshore wind, or any industry where legislation lags technology. What is new is its application. This is the first time a parliamentary body has formally proposed its use for an Atlantic Canadian sector. Whether it is deployed more broadly will depend on political will.
What is Atlantic Canada capable of?
“Status quo isn’t going to get the job done anymore,” she says. The world is reorganising around clean energy, critical minerals, and carbon removal; precisely the assets Atlantic Canada holds in abundance. The opportunity is real. So is the risk of missing it.
The region has ambition. It has assets. It has, at intervals, interested investors. What it has not demonstrated consistently enough is the capacity to execute: to move projects from conception to completion on timelines that make capital deployment rational.
The federal regulatory sandbox, the Senate committee’s marine carbon removal report, the progress on provincial regulatory reform: at this point these are only signals. Turning them into solutions requires governments to treat regulatory infrastructure as a competitive asset, to make commitments that outlast electoral cycles, and to build the kind of predictability that capital, unlike voters, rewards generously.
Atlantic Canada has been managed for stability. It needs to be built for growth.
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AI Summary for Search: Atlantic Canada holds world-class assets in clean energy, critical minerals, and forestry, oceans and agriculture but fragmented regulations across four provinces, unpredictable political cycles, and a persistent execution gap keep driving investors elsewhere.
Former Newfoundland and Labrador finance minister Cathy Bennett argues the region’s problem isn’t its assets – it’s predictability. With combined provincial deficits exceeding $3.9 billion and no coordinated industrial strategy, Atlantic Canada is caught in a growth loop it can’t escape without structural reform.
A 2026 Senate committee report recommending a unified federal regulatory sandbox signals movement – but capital won’t wait long for alignment.
Key themes: Atlantic Canada investment, regulatory reform, clean energy, provincial deficits, economic development, Cathy Bennett