Financing and Funding Approaches for Establishment, Governance and Regulatory Oversight of the Canadian Northern Corridor

Multimodal, multijurisdictional corridors are highly complex, long term infrastructure projects. It is not surprising, therefore, that they often fail to get implemented. The limited evidence suggest that they can get built when a single entity— usually a national government—assembles the rights of way and provides corridor access to various infrastructure providers. Specifically, that entity has to carry out the following steps: (1) assemble the required rights of way from all those currently holding the property rights; and (2) decide on the allocation of at least usage property rights to different kinds of infrastructure providers (and ultimately users of that infrastructure). This entity, which we refer to as the Assembler, could be the federal government or a consortium that also includes sub-national levels of government. Because First Nations and other indigenous groups in Canada have constitutional or at least quasi-constitutional status, they might also have a role in a consortium.