Canada is about to build at a scale it hasn’t attempted in generations. The Major Projects Office is moving mines, transmission lines, ports and northern corridors through coordinated approvals—government figures point to $200 billion in investment represented since last fall, with a stated path to $500 billion in future private investment.
Every one of those projects will generate something almost nobody is thinking about: a complete, outcome-linked record of how the physical world actually gets built. What the ground was like. What was attempted, with which machines and materials, under what conditions. What worked, what failed, what got reworked and what it cost.
Right now, nearly all of that evaporates. It fragments across contractors, lives in proprietary systems and dies on short retention schedules. We will spend hundreds of billions building the infrastructure—and keep none of the knowledge.
Every megaproject should leave Canada two assets: the infrastructure itself, and a secure record of how it was built.
Norway solved this in 1995.
There is a precedent, and it has been running for thirty years. Norway’s Diskos National Data Repository requires petroleum licensees to report well data as a legal duty. The operator stays responsible for completeness and quality even when contractors create the data. Submissions carry structured metadata. Confidentiality windows protect commercial value before release.
Mandatory submission coexists with commercial rights because reporting duties, quality standards, access rights and confidentiality periods were designed together, not bolted on afterward.
Canada can do the same for the physical economy: mines, transmission corridors, ports and highways.
The proposal.
Make standardized, outcome-linked data capture a condition of Major Projects Office support. Every listed project files a Data Capture and Stewardship Plan before major construction. Design it as capture once, report once—standardize data the project already produces: work packages, inspections, equipment telemetry, material tests, environmental monitoring.
The valuable unit is not volume. It is an event linked to a verified outcome: what was attempted, under what conditions, with which tools and materials, what changed and how the result was verified.
Licensing is upside. National capability is the case.
Data revenue should be treated as cost offset and optional upside—not a promise that licensing repays a mine. The defensible return is better regulatory evidence, faster root-cause analysis, safer maintenance and stronger Canadian automation.
Governance comes before collection.
Tiered access—open, licensed, restricted, protected—so regulators, rights holders and the public each see what they are entitled to see. Proponents keep their background IP; the repository gets a durable licence, not ownership.
Indigenous data sovereignty under OCAP principles must be co-designed with affected Nations from day one, not consulted after. The repository itself should live on Canadian-controlled infrastructure.
Three pilots. Eighteen months.
The full paper names three pilots across three physical systems: the North Coast Transmission Line in British Columbia, the Matawinie graphite mine in Québec and the Mackenzie Valley Highway as a conditional candidate whose treaty and regulatory processes come first.
Eighteen months. Published metrics: capture cost, share of records linked to verified outcomes, rights-clearance turnaround, demonstrated safety or maintenance value. Then a scale/no-scale decision, in the open.
The schema should be public.
A standard written behind closed doors becomes someone’s moat. The full proposal sets out a starting data model built around event records, conformance levels, a task taxonomy, confidentiality windows and rights declarations on every filing batch. It is written to be argued with, not adopted as-is.
Someone is going to write the standard for how Canada records the building of Canada. It should happen in public.
The Major Projects Office figures and project context are drawn from the Government of Canada’s September 2026 build announcement ↗.
The Diskos precedent is grounded in the Norwegian Offshore Directorate’s reporting guidance ↗ and its data-release and confidentiality framework ↗.
Views expressed here are Archive Signal’s editorial position. The proposal is a policy concept, not a claim that a Canadian repository currently exists.