The Better Ideas Show brought together more than three dozen guests during Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Investment Summit to talk about nation-building projects that are practical, affordable, and ready to build the new climate economy that will diversify our trade and protect Canada’s sovereignty.

Canada’s push to finance megaprojects and reach new export markets repeats age-old patterns of resource extraction, Teika Newton, executive director of the Lake of the Woods Water Sustainability Foundation, told The Energy Mix.

“I’m just seeing these grandiose, legacy-building massive megaprojects, but not the transformational investments that would really benefit everyone and help to sustain the country,” Newton said.

Newton’s organization champions sustainability planning for the Rainy-Lake of the Woods watershed, an international watershed shared by Minnesota, Ontario, and Manitoba. She said she would prefer projects that address the climate resilience challenges facing underfunded municipalities like Kenora, where infrastructure is in decline.

“The resiliency of municipal infrastructure is at stake, and so many of those costs for bearing the burden of the impacts of climate change have now been downloaded onto a municipality that is really small and doesn’t have a tax base to be able to shoulder that burden.”

For example, “this is a town of 15,000 people. We have 19 bridges to maintain.”

Drought, wildfires, and flooding are impairing the local economy’s ability to move forward, Newton said.

“So if we’re getting really serious about building a nation, shoring up our sovereignty, and making a strong country, we need to start with the fundamentals in the communities where people are really suffering.”

By contrast, the prospectus of projects for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent Canada Investment Summit in Toronto lacked a “long, deep visioning of a diverse economy,” she said. “Things are very siloed, and we’re not seeing big cooperative efforts.”

Newton is urging governments to back community-based clean economy investments instead.

“I’m finding it very disappointing the lack of creativity, ingenuity, and innovation that we’re seeing in the ideas that are being put forward,” she said. “I wish we were seeing that push toward… building retrofits and electrification and integrating more accessible, active, and public transport and intermodal transport to connect communities.”

Teika Newton is a member of the Board of Directors of Energy Mix Productions.