The following op-ed by Chris Gardner, ICBA President and CEO, first ran in the National Post on January 16, 2025.
If you feel Canada is broken, you are not alone.
Last year, ICBA polled British Columbians with a simple question: “Do you agree or disagree with the statement, ‘Everything feels broken in Canada these days.’” 76% of respondents agreed – among people aged 19 to 34, a stunning 87% agreed.
The social contract Canadians thought was in place – work hard, pay your fair share of taxes, buy a home, raise a family – is broken. It’s becoming so difficult and expensive to support families and communities that widespread disenchantment, despondency and even discord is taking hold.
At ICBA, we talk a lot about the hard work that construction professionals do to build our communities. We also celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit and risk-taking that is at the centre of every contracting business.
Construction workers will tell you that the longer you ignore problems on a job site, the worse they become. And in Canada, the Trudeau Government has ignored too many problems for far too long.
That’s why ICBA, Canada’s largest construction association, has endorsed Pierre Poilievre and his commonsense Conservatives.
There was a time when Canada was a nation of proud builders. No project was too big for the ambitions of a young country seeking to assert its place in the world. We built big ports, pipelines, hydroelectric dams, mines, the St. Lawrence Seaway, roads, bridges and houses. We didn’t just build with purpose – we built things fast.
Sadly, those days are long gone. It took us nearly 20 years just to twin an existing pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby, and by the time we end up replacing the Massey Tunnel on one of the busiest transportation corridors in Canada, it will have been a 30-year endeavour. Virtually every major infrastructure project undertaken in Canada today is over budget and overdue. The cost overruns are in the billions and delays are measured in years and even decades. And we are failing to renew our aging infrastructure. In 2024, we had major infrastructure failures in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal.
For most Canadians, the inability to build reveals itself most sharply in the lack of affordable housing. We are building about the same number of homes in Canada today as we did in 1972, two generations ago.
Overregulation, red tape, taxes, and fees have added costs and slowed building to the point where there is little prospect of supply catching up to demand, the key to bringing housing markets back into balance. Our cities are overwhelmed by levels of immigration that we simply cannot absorb. In 2023, we added a population the size of Calgary to Canada and last year, we did the same again.
We’re also getting poorer. The Fraser Institute recently compared median wages in Canadian provinces and U.S. states. All 10 provinces ranked at the bottom of the list, meaning that the average worker in every single U.S. state earns higher wages than their counterparts in every Canadian province.
National Bank reports that since 2018, 15 of 18 manufacturing industries in Canada have experienced negative growth, while the sector as a whole shrunk by five per cent. That translates into businesses closing, lost investment and smaller paycheques.
As the Liberal government sat on its hands, unmoved by the smaller paycheques of workers and Canada’s sharp economic decline, one area they succeeded in growing beyond every expectation has been government itself. Since Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister, the federal workforce has expanded by an eye-watering 43 per cent and the government’s appetite for new programs and deficit spending knows no limits.
The most blatant example of the disconnect between a government that is out of touch with the daily struggles of Canadians is the carbon tax. It continues to ratchet up, punishing Canadians struggling to pay for rent, mortgages, gas and groceries.
Other policy failures include our collapsing health care system, which now has a median wait time of 30 weeks between a referral from a GP to a specialist to get treatment, and increased street crime, where people fear random acts of violence when walking on our streets because of Ottawa’s experiments legalizing the possession of hard drugs and catch-and-release bail policies.
As a nation, the Trudeau Government has made us less bold, less determined, less certain and less ambitious.
So, yes, a large majority of Canadians rightly feel that the country is broken. We are in desperate need of renewal in Canada, with a Prime Minister who has fresh ideas, a commonsense approach to charting a path to prosperity, and who governs with a focus on making paycheques go further, communities safer, and government less pervasive.
Pierre Poilievre is that leader, and the best opportunity for Canada to once again live up to its potential.
