TORONTO—One day, I’ll tell this full story. It’s great. But today, you’ll have to settle for a very abbreviated version. For years, my family has been trying to retrofit an old outbuilding on a piece of property we own. The engineering is a bit complicated, but the regulations shouldn’t have been. The plan was simply to improve and modernize an older structure for productive purposes. No code revisions were required, no special waivers or exemptions. And it still took more than three years to get the permits. There was no particular reason for that beyond bureaucratic delay and dysfunction. That’s simply how long it took.

And I remember, sometime around the three-year mark of the entire process, thinking to myself, as we navigated yet another bureaucratic delay that arrived without explanation, “You know what? I don’t think we’re ever going to build high-speed rail.”

I’ve noted before my skepticism of the federal government’s plans to ram through major infrastructure at speeds we haven’t seen in a generation. I’ve also said that the Major Projects Office is itself a confession of dysfunction. A country that has normal and functional regulatory processes has no need of a Major Projects Office. And a country that needs multiple years to issue permits to retrofit........

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