Jason Roth on Infrastructure Projects in COVID-19 Era

Jason Roth comments in Canadian Lawyer's look at how governments are approaching infrastructure investment in the COVID-19 era.

Jason says the biggest priority of Canadian governments is to ensure economic activity continues and is a source of growth, but he says “I’d love to see them go in interesting new directions. I think the risk of always thinking only of shovel-ready projects is missing out [on] all the value chain of a project; there's a huge amount of professional services, legal engineering, planning, regulatory, that's really a key part of a project.”

On July 9, Alberta announced the Alberta Petrochemical Incentive Program, a 10-year program to attract and support petrochemical projects.

“I think there's an appreciation of the real economic bang for your buck that you can get on these types of projects,” in the context of COVID-19, Jason says. “And so there's probably more likelihood that some governments that may have been reluctant to do deficit spending to [finance them] are now going to do it."