Who’s on the menu in Carney’s omnibus bill?

Nik Barry-Shaw / October 27, 2026 / 10 min read

Canadian PoliticsEconomic CrisisIndigenous PoliticsLabourCanadian Business

Mark Carney’s omnibus Bill C-39, also known as the Building Canada Strong Act has the fingerprints of the Business Council of Canada all over it, writes Nikolas Barry-Shaw. Photo courtesy Mark Carney/Facebook.

To understand what the federal government is doing today, you need only look at what the Business Council of Canada was advocating yesterday.

That quip—slightly modified—by veteran journalist Donald Gutstein is probably the most helpful guide to understanding the origins of Mark Carney’s controversial Bill C-39, which has roused the ire of labour, environmentalists, and First Nations.

Canada’s CEOs have been celebrating the legislation—and with reason. The bill’s multifaceted assault on labour rights, environmental standards, and international and treaty obligations to First Nations is perfectly aligned with the long-standing aims of Corporate Canada.

In the boardrooms of Canada’s leading corporations, executives view environmental rules as unnecessary “red tape” and First Nations’ land rights as obstacles to be bulldozed. They see workers exercising their right to strike as a cancer that must be stopped “before they metastasize,” a problem that governments should “permanently resolve” through legislation, their lobbyists at the Business Council of Canada suggest.

While the Carney government defends Bill C-39 as a necessary response to a time of crisis, many of its provisions can be traced back to policy demands by the CEO lobbying group that date back to before Trump was in office.

In the name of nation building, Bill C-39 is fast-tracking a corporate agenda that doubles down on the worst features of Canada’s economic structure, an agenda that will leave widening inequality and broken treaties, accelerating climate change and expanding sacrifice zones in its wake. And it has fingerprints of the Business Council of Canada all over it.

A sprawling, 243-page omnibus bill modifying 18 pieces of legislation, Bill C-39, also known as the Building Canada Strong Act, has been called “Canada’s most consequential economic legislation in decades.” C-39 would confer sweeping powers on federal cabinet ministers to speed up major projects like pipelines and data centres and limit the right to strike of workers in federally-regulated sectors.

Bill C-39’s changes to the labour code will make it easier for the federal government to shut down strikes in sectors including airlines, telecoms, ports, and railways by invoking the “national interest.” This attack on the right to strike would make the Canadian government’s strikebreaking powers the most far-reaching of any G7 country by far, according to the Canadian Labour Congress.

“Under Bill C-39, the right to strike will only exist in the abstract,” CUPE National President Mark Hancock said in testimony before the special committee reviewing the legislation, echoing the views of labour leaders across Canada. “Because a right that can be taken away the instant it’s exercised is not a right at all.”

On the environmental front, Bill C-39 allows federal ministers to accelerate assessment timelines, unilaterally approve project proposals and even designate “regions of national interest” where the usual assessment processes don’t apply. It’s not for nothing that environmental groups have dubbed C-39 the “Bulldoze Nature Bill.”

Bill C-39 could have significant knock-on effects for Indigenous peoples too. Compressed timelines for approval of major projects like pipelines, LNG terminals, and data centres could infringe on treaty rights and lead to governments and companies bypassing meaningful consultation, First Nations leaders are warning.

“When we look at the details,” write Hadrian Mertens-Kirkwood, Jon Milton, and Rachel Pettigrew in an analysis of Bill C-39 for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, “it becomes clear that the main purpose of this legislation—much like the rest of the federal government’s policy agenda—is about clearing the way for greater corporate profit, at the expense of everything else.”

Designing pro-business policies that clear the way for corporate profits—and repackaging them as serving the “national interest”—is basically what the Business Council of Canada was created for in the 1970s.

Originally called the Business Council on National Issues, one of the main motivators behind the corporate lobby group’s creation was the significant labour unrest that roiled Canada and limited corporate profit margins in the 1970s. The lobby group has also long championed unrestrained development of the Alberta tar sands and other extractive industries.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, prime ministers regularly sought the Business Council’s input on and approval for budgets, and the business lobby group’s myriad policy working groups and sector committees worked tirelessly in the backrooms to turn the policy dreams of the C-suite into legislative reality—often with great success.

At its peak, the Business Council didn’t just influence legislation, it often drafted it. It operated as a kind of “parallel government,” with its chief lobbyist serving as a “de facto prime minister,” as Murray Dobbin observed in a 2007 profile.

That outsized influence in Ottawa flows from the exclusive membership of the lobby group. Membership is restricted to chief executives of Canada’s largest corporations, which means that when the Business Council speaks, it is speaking on behalf of the men (and a few women) who control the commanding heights of Canada’s economy.

In recent years, fast-tracking pipelines, mines and other resource extraction projects and snuffing out labour unrest in key transport sectors have been top priorities for the Business Council of Canada.

With many of its 170 CEO members hailing from oil, gas, and pipeline companies, the Business Council has been naturally eager to undo the climate policies and regulations of the Trudeau years. Well before Mark Carney became prime minister, the Business Council had a highly detailed set of deregulatory demands it was pushing, including the principle of “one project, one review” now contained in Bill C-39.

Canada’s CEOs have also been feeling rattled by recent job actions and sought greater restrictions on the right to strike, pointing to the Air Canada flight attendants’ strike against unpaid work, as well as port and railway worker job actions in 2023 and 2024. “The federal government must step in to protect the clear national interest by putting an end to the frequent disruptions,” wrote Canadian Pacific (CP) CEO and Business Council member Keith Creel in a November 2024 Globe and Mail op-ed.

When rail unions opposed efforts of the highly profitable railway companies to roll back safety provisions for rest periods, CP and CN locked out nearly 10,000 workers. Despite CP raking in nearly $4 billion in profits in 2024, Creel blamed workers for the disruptions and claimed the companies “had little choice in the matter.” Creel himself pocketed a handsome $23.6 million in salary that year.

In the wake of the dispute, Creel called for “a serious national conversation about improving the legal tools the federal government has available to prevent—or rapidly end—a labour disruption that is threatening Canada’s national interest.”

When the trade war hit with the return of Trump, the CEO lobby group saw the crisis as a golden opportunity to move on its long-standing objectives. Canada’s best response to Trump’s threats would be to improve its “competitiveness,” Business Council CEO Goldy Hyder argued in a January 2025 interview with the Financial Post. He said Canada could only ride out the storm by weakening environmental regulations, scrapping climate goals and expediting major infrastructure projects like pipelines, ports, and railways, noting that the “biggest issue I hear from my [CEO] members is we’re over-regulated.”

Business Council of Canada CEO Goldy Hyder appears on Fox News to discuss the trade war with the United States.

Carney’s election has cemented the already warm and fuzzy relationship between the federal government and corporate Canada to the point of fusion. While First Nations, environmental organizations, and migrant rights groups have repeatedly had the door slammed in their faces, CEOs and their lobbyists are benefitting from an “open door” policy—and are taking full advantage. “As Carney moves to act boldly on ready-made ‘nation-building’ projects, corporate honchos want in—and are scoring face time,” Politico reported in July 2025.

No one has been more solicited for input than the Business Council of Canada. CEO Hyder told Politico that the Carney government “has been full of outreach,” so much so that the corporate lobby group struggled to keep up with the invitations. “It has been from the highest levels on down. It has been very consultative. It has been engaging.”

Federal lobbying records confirm this pro-corporate orientation. Between May 1, 2025, and May 31, 2026, the Business Council of Canada met with Prime Minister Carney and his top advisors 31 times, including six times with the prime minister himself, an Investigative Journalism Fund analysis found. Apart from the Hamilton-based steel company ArcelorMittal Dofasco, the CEO lobby group scored more meetings with the Prime Minister’s Office than any other organization.

According to the Business Council, Canada’s future lies in a resource-focused, export-oriented economy. In a July 2025 report, the corporate lobby group called for “a coherent and ambitious policy framework designed to safeguard investments over multiple decades.” Getting resources out of the ground and off to international markets, however, required the federal government to remove the obstacles currently standing in the way.

Key recommendations included compressed regulatory timelines and reduced environmental scrutiny for major projects like pipelines, labour code changes to “prevent work stoppages” in key transport sectors like rail and ports, and a clampdown on “acts of civil disobedience” and “illegal blockades” of transport corridors like the 2020 protests in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en— precisely the kinds of provisions found in Bill C-39.

The Carney government got to work quickly on these pesky obstacles. Business Council Vice-President Theo Argitis, writing in The Hub in August 2025, bemoaned recent labour disputes but noted that legislative relief for corporations fed up with restive workers was on the way.

Echoing CP CEO Creel’s hysterical rhetoric, Argitis likened labour disputes to a cancer that must be stopped “before they metastasize” and argued that securing Canada’s supply chains from disruptions was “nothing short of a national economic emergency.” Fortunately, the Carney government was already on the case. As Argitis informed readers of the conservative outlet:

The intent to send a clear message to investors is evidently shared by the Carney government. When the radical changes contained in Bill C-39 were first floated in May 2026, the government said the reforms were necessary to “instill confidence in investors here in Canada and from around the world.”

Not surprisingly, the Business Council of Canada agreed. The attacks on labour rights and environmental rules would “create much-needed clarity and predictability for investors,“ the CEO lobby group said in a May 2026 communique, and “reflect what Canada’s business leaders have recommended for some time.”

Asked by a journalist if Bill C-39’s attack on labour rights is linked to Carney’s efforts to woo foreign investors in the wake of the Canada Investment Summit, Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne replied that the need to clamp down on labour was self-evident: “I would say [we] don’t need anyone to tell us that” since it was obvious that “in this country we need stability and predictability.”

Since trade talks with the US broke off, Carney has flown higher than ever in the polls. But his recent moves have been so nakedly pro-corporate that a growing number of Canadians are starting to question whose definition of the “national interest” is guiding the federal government.

Already, Carney’s plan to sell off the operation of Canada’s four largest airports to private investors has raised eyebrows. That, coupled with a massive $36 billion corporate tax giveaway (dubbed the “Productivity Mega Deduction”), leaves even sympathetic observers struggling to square these deeply unpopular policy announcements from the Investment Summit with his earlier pledge that “Canada is not for sale.”

The deal book at the Summit, dominated by resource extraction projects, data centres, and public-private partnerships in ports, roads, and public utilities, reinforced the sense that Canada’s resources and infrastructure were being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

“This isn’t really about standing up to Trump,” wrote journalist Linda McQuaig in the wake of the Investment Summit, where many of these policies were announced. “Carney is taking advantage of the fear and loathing Canadians feel towards Trump to justify remaking the country in a way that primarily benefits business interests, not the rest of us.”

Canada’s CEOs know that this chance to remake the country in their interest will not remain open indefinitely. The Business Council has repeatedly stressed the need for speed in implementing changes—presumably to finish the job before Canadians wake up to the con game that is being played on them.

The political window before the federal government to pass fast-track legislation and clamp down on strikes is “unique and time-bound,” the Business Council wrote in its July 2025 report, emphasizing that its CEO members “are prepared to work with the government to seize this generational opportunity.” But the brazenness and arrogance displayed by the Carney government in seizing this opportunity may be what brings its approval ratings down to Earth. Bill C-39 may well galvanize a movement against one of the most popular governments in Canadian history.

Labour organized protests at dozens of MP offices in cities across Canada on October 15. Indigenous land defenders mobilized for a National Day of Action in Ottawa on October 26. And environmental organizations have a unified, cross-movement day of action set for November 12.

Let’s hope the fightback against Bill C-39 marks a turning point in popular consciousness. If not, the direction of change that Carney and the Business Council are driving the country towards is unmistakable.

“The message from the federal government is quite clear: everything is on the menu,” Mertens-Kirkwood, Milton, and Pettigrew write in their CCPA analysis of the omnibus bill. “By making C-39 their signature piece of legislation for this parliamentary session, this government is signalling that the door is wide open for every one of corporate Canada’s demands, no matter the impact on the rest of the population.”

Or, as the prime minister said at Davos, if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

Nikolas Barry-Shaw is the trade and privatization campaigner at the Council of Canadians.

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