Delivering Canada’s infrastructure vision with certainty and resilience

Canada’s government is redoubling infrastructure investment with the national Build Canada Strong Plan, providing a $51 billion boost to provincial and territorial investments in community, health, transit, and trade infrastructure.

This national commitment is meant to act as a force multiplier matched by billions in infrastructure improvements being invested by provinces and local governments from coast to coast. In aggregate, the investments are expected to catalyze growth and opportunities nationwide, creating as many as 42,000 jobs a year and stimulating $95 billion in GDP over the next decade.

Canada’s infrastructure plans come wrapped in a sense of urgency to make projects “shovel-ready” and promote expedient delivery. Yet success hinges more on the up-front work to set programs up to for effective, near-term execution and optimal outcomes over the long term.

From shovel-ready to delivery certainty

High-stakes infrastructure programs are inevitably subject to politics and public scrutiny, pressuring leaders to initiate works early as a show of “shovel-ready” activation.

Too often, this places the proverbial cart before the horse, jumping ahead of thoughtful and thorough consideration of critical requirements, value generation, and ensuring that the program, people, systems, and supply chain are aligned and on the right path to actually bring about the outcomes envisaged.

A premature start locks in untested decisions and expenditures early, when they’re most likely to send the entire program off course. At that point, sunk costs make it far more difficult for program managers to recover when things go wrong.

Our extensive experience and research confirm that the most successful capital programs start slow to finish strong. Rushing to execution only amplifies shortcomings of governance, scope and management. In fact, the greatest value at stake lies in judgements made before construction begins, which is why it pays to allow adequate time to translate thoughtful appraisal and planning into efficient deployment.

A slow start cultivates success by first investing in people, capabilities, and organizational frameworks that enable aligned and agile management. It embeds contingencies into plans and procurements and applies digitally-driven analytics to predict and pre-empt risk. It builds program foundations and disciplines to unlock high performance and value-added outcomes.

As we have seen in Canada and abroad, the same incentives that reward speed also have a way of promoting flawed baselines and false economies that can doom well-conceived projects to fail. 

Redefining infrastructure value in the international context

To compare infrastructure investment across G7 countries, economists typically look at gross fixed capital formation: how much is being spent on long-lasting assets, while accounting for depreciation, divestment, or retirement from use.

But the most important measure is not how much countries invest; it is how much value their investments generate over time, as well as how those investments stimulate additional value by attracting further capital investment surrounding them.

The International Monetary Fund’s message is pointed. Countries can spend heavily on infrastructure and see a large share of that value evaporate at the hands of ineffective project management. In plain terms, infrastructure spending alone isn’t enough to realize durable value that withstands the test of time.

To realize Canada’s aim to expediently build needed infrastructure, the means and methods of delivery matter greatly; not only to keep pace with the funding envelope, but especially to catalyze long-term value multipliers inherent in large-scale infrastructure investments. 

Why collaborative delivery is attractive, and where the trap sits

In a constrained market, a traditional hard-bid procurement can turn a big project into a cage fight. Bidders underestimate risk with optimistic pricing for the sake of winning the bid, and as a result, the delivery phase becomes a grind of change orders, conflicts, and claims. These are problems that collaborative delivery models have been honed to resolve by engaging contractors and stakeholders earlier to align objectives and execution, with realistic pricing and incentives serving the best interests of the program.

Collaborative models are often touted for enabling better risk management, timely constructability insight, and fewer disputes, saving time and cost while improving delivery certainty on complex, high-stakes programs. International guidance on alliancing is explicit about the mechanisms that are meant to make this work, including open-book transparency, joint governance, and shared incentivization structures.

The appeal is clear. If you want to mobilize quickly in a tight market, collaborative models can provide a way out of trench warfare. But a trap is set when leaders misunderstand how collaborative contracts work. They don’t eliminate delivery risk. They redistribute and reduce risk when execution adheres to well-defined governance and decision rights, with qualified multidisciplinary management, close attention to culture, and persistent behavior modeling. It’s more difficult than most realize, and if an owner is not ready to invest energy required to achieve truly collaborative delivery, the risk won’t disappear.

On the contrary, we've seen more harm come from those who only pay lip service to collaboration. They compound risk when decisions hold to hidden agendas and ambiguity about decision authority is allowed to fester, eroding trust. Or when open-book costing creates more noise than clarity. Then, as problems arise, shared risk is quietly reassigned to blame, and a growing cloud of organizational politics obscures sound judgement.

Collaborative delivery is not a definitive process, nor is it about achieving consensus or “playing nice.” It is a prevailing culture that defines the way of working through every aspect of the operating model. It requires leadership highly skilled in breaking down silos and building a fully aligned, integrated team grounded in trust. It is enabled by vigilant coaching, with constant communication, knowledge sharing, and transparency. It's a discipline made easier by digital capabilities that translate project data into predictive insights, AI analytics, modeling, industrialized construction, and automation to benefit performance and productivity throughout the lifecycle.

An effective collaborative approach maintains disciplined controls and helps teams contend with thorny issues and sustain sound decision-making to progress projects at pace. For programs of scale, it provides the means to strengthen assurance, with real-time visibility to improve supply chain readiness, model feasibility, sequencing and continuity over time. All of which requires readiness and commitment on the part of project sponsors to bring full benefits to bear.

It's not only about delivering to-plan and achieving immediate outcomes. It's also about building digital and professional capabilities of people, organizations, and supply chain partners throughout the course of delivery that create viable opportunities for their future benefit. 

We must not confuse a “shovel-ready” state with readiness to deliver, or misinterpret it as a reason to rush to construction before the requisite fundamentals needed to sucessfully manage and deliver programs are in place. Delivery is best accelerated with thorough planning and preparation to reduce friction, providing a ready start. Anything less is a false start that can embed irrecoverable consequences.

Canada can win, but only if readiness becomes the strategy

Canada can win this moment. The capital is there. The need is clear. The will and wherewithal exist across agencies and partners nationwide. Together, we can realize Canada's infrastructure vision to the fullest potential, with real readiness defined not by shovels breaking ground, but rather, by thorough preparation, intentional collaboration, and disciplined execution. It's a prescription proven to ignite generational value from infrastructure investments, an opportunity for Canada to lead the way.