Bell, Peter
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This working paper asks how Canada should assess strategic resource infrastructure that may not earn a commercial return on its own. A road, port, power system, pipeline, smelter, or processing plant can appear uneconomic when evaluated as an individual asset while still enabling new production, preserving difficult-to-replace processing capacity, supporting several users, or improving security of supply. The paper develops a framework for deciding when public support for such an asset may be justified. Its central rule is that an asset-level loss is defensible only when it produces wider benefits that are specific, measurable, and subject to effective public oversight. The analysis draws on Canadian wartime industrial mobilization, concentration in critical-mineral supply chains, proposed support for processing capacity at Trail, current infrastructure and northern development programs, and cautionary cases involving mining subsidies, managed decline, remote transport, and major-project governance. The paper converts the argument into a twelve-question approval test and a measurement framework for tracking public cost, avoided closure, new production, secure supply, shared infrastructure use, and signs of failure. It does not recommend a particular project and does not argue that all loss-making assets deserve public support. Its purpose is to distinguish infrastructure that creates durable public value from subsidy, bailout, or white-elephant risk.