The demand to build across Canada's provinces has never been higher, yet delivering projects predictably on time and on budget has never been more complex. According to recent Statistics Canada data, by 2026, one in five Canadian construction workers will be over the age of 55. This shifting demographic reality means the industry faces a structural bottleneck that traditional recruitment cannot solve alone.
To explore how the sector is adapting, ReNew Canada recently hosted an executive roundtable titled The Digital Mandate: Solving Canada's Construction Labour Shortage, featuring Brandon Milner (CIO and Senior VP at EllisDon), Kenny Leon (Vice President of Member Services and Technology at the Canadian Construction Association), and Kris Lengieza (Global Technology Evangelist at Procore).
The consensus among these leaders was clear: Canada cannot simply hire its way out of this shortage; it must digitize its way out. For forward-thinking builders, the path forward requires moving away from fragmented, paper-and-spreadsheet operations toward a unified platform that maximizes the productivity of every hour on site.
Discussion items:
The administrative tax on teams: Why manual operational silos are draining profit before the office even knows there is a problem.
Connecting field to finance: Eradicating the data gaps between corporate accounting and on-site reality for GCs and Trades.
The rise of practical intelligence: How practical, build-ready AI tools are transforming decades of historical data into forward-looking site foresight.
The "Administrative Tax" on Your Bottom Line
The traditional, siloed approach to managing construction projects is no longer just an operational headache—it has become a distinct financial risk. On today's multi-million and multi-billion dollar Canadian developments, margins are tight, schedules are volatile, and the administrative burden placed on field leaders has pushed teams to a critical breaking point.
"We like to refer to it as the 'administrative tax' of just getting your job done on a day-to-day basis," Kris Lengieza said. Industry research reveals that construction professionals spend up to 80% of their day simply chasing down data or manually duplicating records across disconnected applications, spreadsheets, and paper logs.
When a project team is trapped in an exhaustive cycle of administrative busywork, the entire business suffers. Operational scale stalls, change orders sit unapproved, and billions of dollars are lost globally to preventable rework driven by outdated project information.
When a project team is trapped in an exhaustive cycle of administrative busywork, the entire business suffers. Operational scale stalls, change orders sit unapproved, and billions of dollars are lost globally to preventable rework driven by outdated project information.
“We like to refer to it as the administrative tax of just kind of getting your job done on a day-to-day basis. They spend — and we have research to back this up in some of our reports — about 80% of their time just looking for information that they need to do their job.
How do they go and actually find the things that they need in order to make a decision or to communicate to somebody else, so they can continue on with their job?"
— Kris Lengieza, Global Technology Evangelist, Procore
General Contractors: Eradicating the Field-to-Office "Black Hole"
For Canadian general contractors, project execution typically turns into a frustrating series of manual handoffs between distinct business units. The structural disconnect between field operations and accounting systems creates a dangerous operational blind spot. While superintendents capture daily logs and material delivery notes on-site, corporate accounting personnel manage budgets and change orders inside a completely isolated ERP or financial system.
This lag creates an operational "black hole." Project executives have no real-time mechanism to assess whether the work performed today was actually profitable. By the time field information is manually compiled, corrected, and reconciled against corporate budgets weeks later, it is far too late to mitigate a cost overrun that has already eroded thousands of dollars from the bottom line.
To scale successfully, GCs must centralize these disconnected channels into a single source of truth. Centralizing pre-construction bidding data, mobile-friendly quality inspections, and real-time project financials allows operations leaders to spot at-risk scopes of work early enough to preserve their project margins.
“I think when we talk about this handoff process, what we're really talking about is how do we take the knowledge that was learned by the pre-construction manager, the estimator, when they were doing the takeoff [...] and give that to the operations team and to the field?
Our ROI study shows about 60% of them agree that the handoff between the pre-construction and operations teams can significantly improve when you're adopting these [...] project management platforms well."
— Kris Lengieza, Global Technology Evangelist, Procore
Specialty Contractors: Stopping Profit Fade by the Hour
There is an outdated perception across the Canadian market that platform software only serves the GC. The reality is that Procore is purposefully made for the trades. Specialty Contractors operate under an entirely different risk profile than general contractors: trades must pay for labour, equipment, and raw material commodities up front, yet they routinely wait 60 to 90 days following project completion to clear payment applications.
In an environment of fluctuating commodity prices and high labour scarcity, profit fades by the hour. If an expensive, highly skilled mechanical or electrical crew is left sitting idle on a jobsite because a preceding trade failed to finish their scope on schedule, the resulting cost overrun comes directly out of the trade contractor's pocket. They own 100% of that execution risk.
To fight this margin erosion, advanced specialty contractors are using granular resource management tools to track actual field production down to the hour:
Eliminating hidden skill gaps: Standardizing workflows across a centralized hub of certifications to match the right craftspeople to jobs, stopping overstaffing before crews hit the field.
Guardrails for margin protection: Capturing actual hours and progress from a mobile-first interface so project managers can compare planned vs. actual labour costs with a single click.
Restoring the craft: Giving foremen their time back so they belong in the field, mentoring the next generation, rather than doing hours of "unpaid homework" chasing paper timecards in the trailer.
Maintaining an unassailable, real-time digital record of site progress does more than protect trade cash flow -- it ensures trades have the automated audit trails required to defend their budgets and secure payment for every single change order executed.
Project Owners: Unlocking the Value of Capital Dollars
Whether managing public infrastructure programs or funding private commercial portfolios, institutional project owners and developers require complete transparency to confidently deploy capital. Without unified operational visibility, owners find themselves trapped in an entirely reactive posture, discovering significant budget overruns long after the structural modifications have occurred on site.
To maintain portfolio predictability, sophisticated owners are shifting away from manual oversight toward connected workflows. Syncing critical project documentation, commitments, and invoicing data across contractor and consultant accounts gives owners a real-time, side-by-side view of actual project health.
As EllisDon CIO Brandon Milner explained during the session, this shift is increasingly driven by client expectations. On massive capital builds, sophisticated clients understand that digital metrics are non-negotiable:
"When you're managing a $4 to $6 billion project, you can't run it out of Excel. The sheer nature and scale of modern work force us into digitization. Technology infrastructure costs are increasingly baked directly into the baseline project delivery costs within RFPs. There is an accepted technology section now, so we face very little pushback from owners."
This unified strategy ensures that from early design coordination straight through to final asset handoff, every capital investment delivers measurable, long-term portfolio value.
“Clients are getting more savvy and their demands are getting more mature in terms of their expectations of reporting... When you're managing a four, five, six billion-dollar project, you can't be writing it on Excel. So, I think just the nature of the work that we're doing will sort of force us to become more digitized."
— Brandon Milner, CIO and Senior VP, EllisDon
The Bottom Line: Turning Data Into Actionable Foresight
The Canadian construction industry has clearly moved beyond the era of fragmented point solutions toward fully integrated platform environments. However, the future of the sector isn't just about collecting information—it is about turning that collected data into forward-looking business intelligence.
With Procore AI and Procore Analytics, construction leaders are transforming decades of historical project history into actionable site foresight. This is not abstract artificial intelligence built for marketing hype; it is practical, build-ready AI designed to work naturally alongside site teams from day one.
Field superintendents and foremen can now use tools like Procore Resource Planning to get real-time insight into workforce availability and equipment assets with a centralized scheduling and communication hub.
Ultimately, implementing modern technology is no longer just an operational upgrade; it is an essential strategy for business survival and workforce retention.
“We are in a tight labour market. And so, when you're trying to recruit and bring on the best people, they are looking now at what you have in your tech stack. And so if you're unwilling to invest in it [...] they're going to go work somewhere else. Even some of the executives that I talk to see no longer is technology 'the thing I have to do'; it's something that I'm investing in to improve my workforce because I can either bring in or retain [...] talent inside of my organization and improve us moving forward. "
— Kris Lengieza, Global Technology Evangelist, Procore
In a relationship-driven industry where execution is everything, the ultimate tool in your toolbox is total connection.
Ready to eliminate the admin drain on your projects? Learn how Procore’s AI-powered platform connects General Contractors, Specialty Contractors, and Owners to deliver more predictable, profitable, and safer builds across Canada.
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