Ella Plotkin at Fasken talks about how public risk-sharing and clear rules bring long-term capital to major projects
Canada’s next wave of major infrastructure projects will stand or fall on whether governments are prepared to share risk, commit money up front and pull private capital into the room, according to infrastructure lawyer Ella Plotkin.
“What these projects need is they need the ability of the public sector and the private sector to come together to execute,” she says. “Governments may need to take on a little bit more risk than they have in [the] past in order to bring that private capital to the table, unless they just want to fund it all out of public funds, which is not the intention and is not the desire,” she says.
Plotkin, a partner at Fasken and vice-chair of the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, has spent three decades advising developers, lenders, and governments on complex deals, ranging from urban transit and airports to pipelines and transmission. She says public-private partnerships are shifting from a specialist procurement tool to a central engine of Canada’s growth agenda as Ottawa seeks to accelerate infrastructure.
The federal government has earmarked tens of billions of dollars for projects and established a Major Projects Office (MPO) to expedite the development of nationally significant projects. Plotkin says the headlines matter less than whether the MPO can convert money and mandates into bankable projects. She notes that the office is meant to streamline a regulatory process that can see projects “either just get mired in approvals, which is what Canada is known for, or take five years” by imposing “two-year approval timelines,” she says. It is also tasked with securing funding from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund, and other federal programs to support projects with significant capital gaps.
Many of the first projects designated for the MPO are already far along in the permitting process or even under construction, and she expects to see some early wins as a result. The harder test, she says, will be whether the office can coordinate federal programs, provincial regulators and Indigenous consultation into a coherent path from proposal to notice to proceed, rather than adding one more layer of process that slows everything down and leaves investors guessing about timelines.
Plotkin believes the broader impact of the MPO could be more significant than the specific projects it identifies. She argues that the new regime “is catalyzing a lot of other projects” that will never appear on the official list but will feed off the momentum, drawing “more attention, more traction, more interest, more funding, more loan guarantees, more Indigenous partnerships,” she says. Those regional transit, energy and social projects will still depend on whether governments are willing to structure genuine partnerships that align interests.
That, in her view, demands a tougher, more granular approach to risk allocation. She says “risk allocation questions are ones that have very much come to the forefront” and that the core challenge in any model is constant: “What is the right risk allocation? Where should the risks lie, who’s best able to bear them, who’s best able to price them, and what should be the consequences of certain risks coming forward or not?”
She argues that governments also need to confront the geographic and revenue realities of different projects rather than forcing them into a single formula. “If you’re looking to develop a project in the far north, in the Arctic, … obviously … it’s not going to happen in the same way as you’re developing a project in Ontario,” she says. In remote regions with weak or non-existent user revenues, “the funding mechanisms will have to be innovative and adapt to that, as will the risk sharing,” she says, and public authorities will often have to take “a little bit more risk” to unlock the scale of private capital that Ottawa wants to attract.
That extra public skin in the game, Plotkin argues, is the price of securing investors who stay through political change and construction shocks. “The history of P3s has shown that where you have long-term private capital, private equity investment, that’s where you have successful long-term projects,” she says. Her advice for policymakers and procuring agencies is clear: “Make sure you do what it takes to bring the private capital on board. And if it means putting in the public capital or the guarantees or taking on more risk in certain projects than you might have traditionally done, do that to bring the private capital on board because they will bring in the expertise, the oversight. It’ll create the right incentives for the projects to succeed,” she says.
Regulation, in her view, needs the same discipline as financing. “Stability and certainty are… two of the fundamental key needs for any project development for people putting their money behind the project and moving it forward,” she says. When permitting is delayed and approvals stretch indefinitely, “that’s a detriment to development. It’s an absolute correlation. There’s no gray area. The faster you can get things approved and moving forward, the more projects you’re going to develop. It’s [a] simple truism,” she says. Ottawa’s goal of approvals within two years for designated projects is, in her words, “a very laudable positive development,” but she warns that provincial jurisdiction and the duty to consult Indigenous communities will decide whether the promise holds up.
Indigenous participation itself is a structural feature of modern project finance, not an afterthought. Plotkin points to a recent transaction in which 36 First Nations in British Columbia are investing in a 12.5 percent ownership stake in Enbridge’s Westcoast natural gas pipeline system, supported by a $400 million loan guarantee under the new Federal Indigenous Loan Guarantee Program. “There is an example where there was debt that came in, but the government enabled it,” she says.
Those kinds of structures are now central to conversations at the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, where Plotkin serves as vice chair. The council brings together contractors, equity developers, funders, advisors and public officials and is “very active in advocacy, in working with governments at all levels,” she says. A current focus is municipal outreach and education to see whether “this public-private partnership set of tools can actually help advance some of the municipal needs and projects so they could utilize them,” she says.
Asked what she would tell the prime minister and his senior ministers, Plotkin does not offer a single magic reform. Instead, she advocates for a mindset that utilizes public balance sheets and clear rules to attract private money, backed by long-term funding commitments that are “contractualized” on a project-by-project basis. In her view, governments that lock in realistic risk allocation, carry visible skin in the game and insist on long-term private capital at the table are the ones that will get projects built.
