Builders, Baby, Builders? The Half a Million Worker Question

Canada’s new era of “building” is officially underway.

In September, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced five flagship projects to be reviewed by the new Major Projects Office, with more to come in the weeks ahead, which he says will be central to transforming the nation’s economy. He also unveiled the first phase of the Build Canada Homes program, with 4,000 units planned on federal land, as the opening step toward his pledge to double home construction.

It’s a sweeping vision, one Carney has branded with a simple slogan: “build, baby, build.” The federal government is signalling nothing less than a step-change in public and private construction. Yet without a strategy to mobilize and train enough skilled workers, those ambitions risk being capped by the limits of Canada’s construction labour force. For all the attention on regulatory obstacles, financing tools, and fast-tracking approvals, the true test of this agenda will be people.

This Future of Canada Centre analysis measures that constraint. We quantify how many additional workers would be required on worksites each year from 2026 to 2030 to meet Ottawa’s targets for housing and infrastructure. The goal is to gauge the extent of Canada’s labour-math problem and size the potential gap between ambition and delivery: how far current capacity needs to stretch before schedules and budgets begin to give.

We’ve seen what that looks like in practice. During the “perfect storm” in British Columbia in 2022–23, four megaprojects—Coastal GasLink, the Trans Mountain Expansion, LNG Canada, and Site C—all hit their peak labour demand at the same time. The result was bidding wars for electricians, welders, crane operators and concrete crews, schedule delays, and spiralling costs.

The same pattern held true during the frenzied oil sands expansion in the first decade-and-a-half of the 2000s, despite the safety valve of an influx of Atlantic Canadian workers into Alberta. If the build, baby, build ambitions materialize, the national jobs market could start to look a lot like B.C. and Alberta at peak overlap when it was not a shortage of money or projects holding back activity, but the lack of available workers.

Swap Kitimat and Fort MacMurray for every region in the country and you potentially have the contours of Canada’s near-term reality, this time without the availability of surplus workers unable to find employment near home and willing to move or commute to other regions for jobs on major projects. And the workforce expansion required is on the order of hundreds of thousands.

Three streams
Deloitte’s modelling estimates incremental headcount requirements from three big demand streams emerging from the federal agenda. One, doubling housing starts. Two, lifting public infrastructure spending from current levels, amid a push for more nation-building projects. And three, unlocking an additional $500 billion of private investment, as pledged in the Liberal platform.

Start with housing. Doubling new home construction would translate into a six-figure increase in construction workers by 2030. Under constant productivity, we estimate the additional workers required for just housing rise from about 58,000 in 2026 to roughly 290,000 by 2030. If construction productivity improves by 10 per cent, the 2030 requirement still lands near 264,000. To put these numbers into perspective, the housing plan alone could need more workers than Alberta’s entire construction labour force, all by the end of the decade.

Public infrastructure spending is a second potential source of pressure. Right now, public infrastructure expenditures as a share of GDP stand near their long-run average, about 3.9 per cent of the economy. Holding public investment at current intensity implies a relatively modest addition of about 22,000 extra workers by 2030, according to our calculations. But it’s reasonable to conclude Ottawa will try to push the envelope.

Should the public investment share return to prior peak levels (of about 5.1 per cent of the economy), the labour lift rises to roughly 87,000 additional workers by 2030. A midpoint scenario between current levels and earlier peaks brings total new demand to about 54,000. While these figures are smaller than the requirements for new housing, they stack on top of it and would draw from many of the same trades.

Private investment is a third planned source of additional demand for construction workers. Mark Carney’s government has set a five-year goal of “catalyzing” $500 billion in additional capital spending by business, or about $100 billion a year. That would represent a sudden increase in business investment of nearly 20 per cent. Our model points to roughly 140,000 extra workers needed by 2030 at flat productivity should that investment occur. An ambitious 10 per cent productivity gain would ease the strain, but only to about 128,000 by 2030.

Adding everything up from all three sources of demand, Deloitte’s 2030 estimates for new labour requirements range from about 410,000 to about 520,000, depending on the mix of ambition and productivity assumptions. Canada’s construction workforce was about 1.7 million in August. So, the additional requirements would equate to a one-third increase in the current construction workforce over a five-year period, a growth rate not seen since the boom years before the global financial crisis.

It appears we may be setting the stage for a new perfect storm, this time on a national scale, in which governments, businesses, and real estate developers all compete simultaneously for the same pool of trade workers.

And these are net requirements. They assume zero retirements, whereas a large cohort of experienced tradespeople is about to exit.

According to BuildForce Canada's national projection for 2025–2034, more than 270,000 construction workers—roughly 15% of the labor force in 2024—will, in fact, retire by 2034. Which means that over the next ten years, the total gross recruiting requirements could rise well over 800,000 when policy-induced new demand is combined with retirements and typical building growth.

If that’s not enough, these numbers also don’t account for other difficulties that builders will face in the years to come, such as the inevitable geographic mismatch in demand, problems with project sequencing, and the disincentives and delays to putting tens of thousands of workers through training programs.

The core point stands. The constraint on Canada’s building ambitions isn’t just regulation or money. It’s also people, and in very large numbers. It’s clear there will be no successful scale-up of national building plans without a parallel human-resources strategy.

Human resources plan
What could that strategy look like?

First, this can’t be solved by any single actor. It will take a coordinated, sustained effort by federal and provincial governments, employers and project owners, colleges and training providers, apprenticeship authorities and unions (and, depending on where projects are located, Indigenous partners).

Domestically, industry and governments will need to be smarter about tapping the existing pool of workers and targeting future newcomers, especially given the expected decline in overall immigration intake over the next few years.

For example, there’s room to widen the pipeline by encouraging women and other under-represented groups—including racialized Canadians and youth—to pursue careers in the trades. Women make up only about 13 per cent of the construction workforce. The strategy should be explicitly inclusive and re-skilling-focused so workers from slower-growing parts of the economy can more seamlessly transition into paid apprenticeships without long income gaps. To support this effort, industry and government should also think hard about how to redesign work to improve conditions that broaden the candidate pool and improve retention. This could include providing more family-friendly work rotations and safer worksites.

Canada’s immigration system, meanwhile, will need to shift the mix toward the trades within the new existing planning levels. In other words, the federal government will need to raise the share of admissions for applicants already equipped with construction-trade skills. Current pathways through Express Entry and Provincial Nominee Programs already exist, but the scale of the challenge requires rebalancing selection toward priority occupations.

Another important task for policy makers, particularly in provincial capitals, is the need to fix credential-recognition bottlenecks. The objective should be to get newly arrived skilled workers onto worksites within weeks, not years. This should be a priority of the government’s ‘one not 13 economies’ policy thrust.

Then there’s the critical collaboration needed between employers and governments. This means making sure that policies align with actual hiring and training capacity. For example, recruitment alone won’t be enough without employers willing to bring apprentices on site. Training newcomers is costly and productivity-draining in the short term, especially in an industry with high attrition. A serious labour strategy could include targeted incentives to help cover some up-front costs and encourage builders to take on more apprentices, while keeping safety considerations paramount.

The current co-operative political moment could provide a helpful window for increased labour mobility through more nationwide skills recognition, as well as an increased willingness to collaborate across governments.

This is critical because history shows that when megaprojects overlap, a lack of coordination is a major point of failure. A national build-out can’t afford multiple regions creating localized “perfect storms.” The federal government is uniquely positioned to act as system coordinator with provincial support. The new Major Projects Office, for example, could be tasked with sequencing and coordinating timelines for significant infrastructure projects so industry can better forecast labour demand, smooth peaks and avoid wage spikes and shortages.

Where collaboration exists, businesses are better able to benefit from labour market efficiencies. Such has been the case with Ontario Power Generation and Bruce Power maximizing their bang-for-buck by sharing resources and equipment in their nuclear refurbishment projects.

Above all, however, is the need to boost productivity. Over the last ten years, output per worker has fallen by 7 per cent in construction. Although it’s a complex phenomenon, builders will need to apply technology and better processes to build more with the people they have —out of necessity. Governments can help by assisting builders to scale up, as larger firms are more inclined to invest in new technologies.

Policymakers can also reduce regulatory barriers and use the tax system to encourage investment in robotics, modular building and prefabrication. Our analysis shows that a 10 per cent productivity gain alone could reduce labour requirements by roughly 50,000 workers by 2030.

There are many ideas in circulation, and opportunities. But it starts with acknowledging that the defining constraint of the next decade will not be a lack of projects, but a shortage of people to build them. Unless Canada develops a parallel labour strategy, Canada’s building agenda will remain more vision than reality.