Thank you for the question. It has a tough one to answer because it depends on the project we're considering and there is often a tension between local needs and goals and wider community or national needs and goals, which need to be balanced. The federal government has a responsibility to speak for all Canadians, and sometimes that can put it in tension with a local desire around infrastructure.
For instance, we see this sometimes in rail projects where there could be a lot of benefit for the rail infrastructure but it has large impacts on the local community.
Yes, that is an important impact and one that needs to be taken into account, but especially for national-scale projects or things that are important at a scale larger than community, we need to be careful to balance the ability of a local community to veto something that is very important.