An election pause costs little if the file is complete when decision-makers return. It costs most when the owner spends it waiting.
Between October 5 and November 9, 2026, Canada has two provincial general elections and municipal elections in five provinces. Quebec held its general election on October 5. British Columbia, where Premier David Eby called a snap election on September 22, votes on October 24, a week after its municipal elections on October 17. Ontario’s municipalities vote on October 26, Manitoba’s on October 28, Prince Edward Island’s on November 2 and Saskatchewan’s on November 9.
For owners with files in front of a ministry or a council, that calendar matters more than the election results. In Canada, PRI expects permitting navigation and funding decisions to slow for about six weeks across the campaign and the formation of a new cabinet.
The pause lands on systems that are already changing speed. British Columbia has set targets to halve water and land authorization timelines by 2030 and to clear all permitting backlogs by 2035, and its progress shows how uneven the change is: average processing for housing-related applications fell from 322 days to 152, while the overall reduction across natural resource application types is 13 per cent. Ontario’s Special Economic Zones Act, 2025 lets the province exempt designated projects from provincial rules and municipal by-laws. Ottawa has signed “one project, one review” assessment agreements with B.C. (2019), New Brunswick (December 2024) and Ontario (December 2025), with others in negotiation. Faster lanes are opening for some files, and the rest join the same queues as before.
That line between routine and new decides how long a file waits. A file that needs only a routine, statutory decision can keep moving through a campaign. One that needs a new funding commitment, a policy change or a council vote waits for a sworn-in decision-maker, however good it is.
Application timeline uncertainty is the argument for making the most of the pause. The time a file spends waiting is largely decided before it is submitted: whether the application is complete, whether the reviewer has seen the project before, and whether the questions a reviewer will ask have already been answered. A complete file submitted the week a decision maker resumes normal business joins the front of the queue. A file still missing a fish timing window, or an adequate mitigation plan joins the back of it, and the winter survey season will not help.
This is where faster permits come from in practice, and it is less mysterious than it sounds. Long-standing working relationships with regulatory staff, new contacts built before a file needs them, and everyone on the project treated as one problem-solving team: owner, consultants, contractors, Indigenous communities and the regulator. Relationships do not change the rules a statutory decision-maker applies. They change how early a file’s problems surface, which is where most of the saved time sits.
The strongest objection is that streamlining will make this matter less. Across the country, governments are removing steps: B.C.’s Renewable Energy Projects (Streamlined Permitting) Act, introduced on April 30, 2025, made the BC Energy Regulator a single window for designated renewable projects, and B.C. amendments announced on February 27, 2026 removed the authorization requirement for dewatering under the Water Sustainability Regulation and simplified low-risk riparian work. Those changes help but read the stated purpose: to redirect staff time toward high-risk applications. Low-risk files will increasingly move on their own. The files that still wait are the complex ones, and those are precisely the files where early engagement and a complete submission decide the timeline.
The same logic carries through construction. Commitments made to obtain a permit become conditions a contractor has to meet months later, often by people who were not in the room when they were negotiated. A team that carries the file from application through construction monitoring keeps those commitments intact, which is usually cheaper than rediscovering them in a stop-work order.
Two pieces in this issue follow from that. You Asked sets out why baseline field work should push ahead through the election, when a new cabinet can pause a decision but not move a field season. From the Practice looks at keeping a file’s data current so it does not lose its place when decision-makers return.
An owner who resubmits the day after cabinet is sworn in, with every deficiency already closed, will have lost nothing to this election. Most will have lost the weeks and then some.
Have a file waiting on a provincial decision? Talk to the PRI Team today.
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“We find solutions that other consultants don’t see.”
Melony Catana, AScT
Practice Lead, Environmental Services
melony.catana@priengineering.com