For a country defined by its vast geography, Canada is startlingly bad at transporting goods. We haven’t been serious about building transportation networks since the 1970s, and now our lack of infrastructure is hampering our ability to trade with other countries and even between provinces. For Canada to be resilient in a changing global economy, that must change now.

Some of our greatest building projects were born out of moments of national urgency. We constructed the TransCanada Pipeline in the years after the Second World War on the back of a post-war economic boom, and then the Trans-Canada Highway a decade later with leftover wartime stimulus. Letting our infrastructure languish in a global time of reform and innovation would have left us behind. Now we face a new crisis. A trade war with the United States is laying bare our outsized dependence on a single trading partner. We spent much of the last century strengthening our trade ties with the U.S. because it’s easy: we share a border, a language and a regulatory approach.

But try moving goods from Alberta to Ontario, or Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia. You’ll quickly find bottlenecks, missing links and backlogs at our overstretched ports. Our three cancelled pipeline projects—the Keystone, the Northern Gateway, and Energy East—are not the only blemishes on our record. Montreal and the St. Lawrence River are inaccessible to many modern container ships, which blocks them from entering Eastern Canada. The Port of Churchill faces limited commercial potential due to seasonal ice conditions and poor inland connectivity. And while jets can carry cargo to our territories, suitable runways remain limited.

For generations now, we’ve lost our nerve to build our own transportation networks. And that’s a problem: to leverage our vast natural resources and bulletproof our........

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