Canada Says “Get More Competitive.” Construction Should Start With Productivity

Recap from Part 1: In my first post, I took a run at one of the most common sleights-of-hand in construction politics: big headline workforce numbers that get repeated as if they’re counts of active, on-tools workers. The point wasn’t to pick a fight. It was to make sure governments are making procurement decisions based on reality—because if you misunderstand the size and structure of the workforce, you’ll misunderstand the consequences of exclusionary rules. 

This post is the “so what.” Once you accept that Canada’s construction workforce is diverse and organized through multiple labour models, it becomes harder to defend procurement and labour eligibility rules that gate access to public work—especially when they reduce flexibility and productivity on the jobsite.

Over the past year, Canadian leaders have been saying the same thing on repeat: we’ve got to pull together, get more competitive and stop tying ourselves up with internal barriers—especially with fresh uncertainty coming from our southern neighbour and a rougher global environment. First Ministers have even put out joint statements committing to eliminate internal trade barriers and strengthen labour mobility.

All good. Necessary, even.

But here’s the part that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: construction competitiveness isn’t mainly a slogan problem—it’s a productivity problem. And procurement and labour eligibility rules are a big lever on productivity because they shape who can show up, how work is organized, and how quickly crews can adapt on schedule-critical builds.

If Canada is serious about building faster housing-enabling infrastructure, hospitals, transit, major industrial and clean-economy projects, then we need to stop pretending that procurement and labour model choices are “inside baseball.” They directly affect handoffs, downtime, scheduling friction and the ability to deploy multi-skilled crews.

The Simple Truth (The One That Actually Hits Schedules)

Productivity in construction is often reduced to “work harder.” That’s not how job sites work.

A lot of real productivity comes down to:

• handoffs between trades and scopes,
• downtime waiting for the next trade to arrive,
• coordination friction between multiple agreements and dispatch systems, and
• how quickly crews can be redeployed when conditions change.

So procurement rules that narrow labour options or lock projects into one labour ecosystem don’t just affect “who wins.” They affect how efficiently the work gets done.

This next point is my interpretation, but it’s grounded in jobsite reality: the more a project’s rules increase handoffs, coordination friction and downtime, the harder it is to hit schedule—no matter how motivated everyone is.

Why Eligibility Rules Matter (Atlantic Canada is Part of This Story)

This isn’t only about B.C. Eligibility rules show up in different ways across the country—especially where tendering is restricted to a subset of the market.

Atlantic Canada has long experience with procurement environments where labour-model eligibility (who is allowed to bid based on labour affiliation/structure) becomes a gate. Whatever the original rationale, the practical effect is the same: you reduce the pool of contractors and labour models available to deliver work and you lose flexibility—right when flexibility is what saves schedules.

That kind of “eligibility by labour model” is not neutral. It favours one way of organizing labour—whether or not it’s the most productive option for the job in front of you.

We’ve Seen This Movie in Canada: Hamilton v. Toronto

Now layer in the other piece of competitiveness: cost pressure.

If you want a clean Canadian example of what happens when you widen access and increase competition, look at Hamilton. Cardus points to Hamilton city staff analysis showing savings from opening tendering ranging 9% to 32%, averaging about 21%, on affected projects.

Then Cardus applies that experience to Toronto. In Better Choices for Toronto, Cardus estimates about $1.65B in closed-tendering contracts in 2023 and presents an illustrative potential savings figure of about $347M under open bidding (using Hamilton’s observed experience as the comparator).

That’s not theory. That’s what happens when you either widen or narrow the bidder pool.

Now Zoom Out: B.C. is the “Granddaddy” of Labour-Eligibility Gating

If Atlantic Canada shows what labour-model gating looks like over time, British Columbia is the most dramatic modern example of formalizing it at scale.

Under B.C.’s CBA/BCIB framework, workers on CBA projects are required to join one of the 19 AIRCC-affiliated unions within 30 days (including supervisors).

BCIB also says open shop companies can work on CBA projects. But here’s the practical reality that matters on a jobsite: you can participate provided your workforce runs through that AIRCC union lane while on the project.

That’s why the beneficiary is not hard to identify: the Building Trades–aligned union set embedded in AIRCC. If you’re inside the lane, great. If you’re outside it, your labour has to convert to it to stay on the job.

And yes—when a policy controls labour access like this, it starts to behave like an internal barrier. But the bigger issue isn’t the label. The bigger issue is what it does to capacity and productivity.

And the timing couldn’t be worse. Budget 2026 explicitly talks about “repacing the capital plan” after years of rapid construction—i.e., stretching out timelines to keep the program sustainable. When government is already slowing and sequencing projects for fiscal reasons, it should be stripping out self-inflicted productivity constraints—not doubling down on labour-lane gatekeeping.

The “Big Money” Point: This Isn’t a Boutique Policy

Here’s why B.C. matters to the national conversation: these rules are attached to mega-projects.

• Fraser River Tunnel Project (Massey replacement): $4.15B.
• Broadway Subway: $2.954B.
• Pattullo Bridge Replacement: design-build contract scope fixed price $967.5M (contract scope).

And B.C.’s fiscal plan shows $37.7B in taxpayer-supported capital over three years, plus another ~$15.3B in self-supported capital by commercial Crowns—for about ~$53B total.

So the point of naming these projects isn’t to claim “X caused Y.” It’s to say: this is real scale, and any procurement model that reduces flexibility and competition at this scale carries real cost and schedule consequences.

The “Hamilton Dividend” Applied to B.C. (Illustrative, Not Predictive)

Here’s a sensitivity check, not a forecast. I’m not claiming B.C. “would save X%.” I’m showing the order-of-magnitude stakes when competition is constrained at capital-plan scale.

Hamilton observed 9–32% savings (avg ~21%) when tendering was opened.

Now ask: what is the order-of-magnitude value-for-money stake when B.C. narrows labour pathways and potentially narrows bidder dynamics at capital-plan scale?

On B.C.’s $37.7B taxpayer-supported capital plan, if only 25% of that spend is meaningfully affected by restricted tendering and the “competition dividend” is even:

• 5% → about $470M
• 10% → about $940M
• 21% (Hamilton average, purely illustrative) → about $2.0B

Again: not a prediction. Just a plain reminder that small percentage differences are enormous when programs are enormous.

The Competitiveness Test (Three Questions)

If Canada is serious about competitiveness, here are three questions every decision-maker should ask before locking public work into restrictive procurement or labour eligibility rules:

1. Does this rule reduce productivity on site—more handoffs, more downtime, less flexibility?
2. Does it shrink the contractor and labour pool we can draw from in a tight market?
3. Can we achieve the same worker and community outcomes without prescribing one labour model as the gatekeeper?

If the answer to #3 is “yes,” then the restriction isn’t a public-interest necessity—it’s a choice. And in a productivity and capacity crunch, it’s usually the wrong choice.

A Message to Canada’s Leaders

If we mean what we say about competitiveness, construction has to be part of it. Not next year. Now.

Stop designing procurement as if productivity is someone else’s problem. Stop writing eligibility rules that pre-select labour ecosystems instead of rewarding performance. And stop pretending we can build faster while voluntarily sidelining major parts of the workforce.

Canada doesn’t need more speeches about building. It needs procurement and labour policies that actually help us build.