Why Canada stopped building, and what it would take to start again.
A series of research papers on construction culture, regulatory accumulation and the economics of getting anything built in this country. Some look backwards at the people and projects that did build at scale. Some look at what replaced them. One proposes something new.
They are free to read, and they are the reason InPresentia exists: every one of them ends up at the same place, which is that we have gotten very good at documenting process and very bad at keeping a record of what was actually built.
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01
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How Do We Get Innovative…Again?
The paper the series opens with. Few phrases quietly kill more innovation than “this is how we’ve always done it” — on the causation trap, imported best practices that were never universal laws, and the point at which “proven” stops meaning “best” and starts meaning “least questioned.”
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02
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Ontario’s Housing Giants
From individuals to empires. A research study into the founders and forces behind fourteen of Ontario’s largest homebuilders and rental developers — where each one started, what nearly killed it, and what separated the companies that lasted from the competitors that did not.
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03
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The Cathedral and the Condo
How Canada confused process with achievement. A rezoning, an environmental assessment, a site plan approval — these are steps toward a goal, not the goal itself. On construction culture, regulatory accumulation, and the path back to building at scale.
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04
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The Missing Builder Class
The people who built Canada, and why we stopped producing them. Carpenters who could read a rafter table in their head; foremen who knew every trade they managed because they had worked most of them. On craft knowledge, trades formation, and the difference between a volume shortage and a knowledge one — which do not respond to the same remedy.
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05
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The Consultant Economy
When process became the product. A kick-off meeting that once held four or five principal parties now holds fifteen or twenty, each with a scope, a contract, and a liability policy describing exactly where their responsibility ends. On the rise of the intermediary economy and the displacement of accountability.
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06
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Standardization Is Not the Enemy
What the world forgot about building at scale. The problem with modern construction is not that we build too much the same — it is that we have forgotten how to build enough of anything. On repetition, industrialized housing, and the recovery of Canadian building capacity.
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07
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The Projects That Built Canada
Ten projects, three questions each: what was the actual bet, what did it build that is still standing, and what would the same project look like today — built better, already fixed, or quietly impossible? What Canada’s greatest infrastructure still teaches us about building at national scale.
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08
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The Missing Middle Scale
Building the housing form Canada keeps ignoring. The debate defaults to two options — detached homes or towers — and skips the building large enough to be economically efficient yet small enough to fit a suburban street. Missing middle scale, not missing middle density; the difference is the point.
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09
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Housing Is Infrastructure
The built environment doesn’t function without it. Ottawa renamed Infrastructure Canada to Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada and never explained what logic the two share. This paper finishes that sentence — and tests the claim against the four criteria that actually define infrastructure, rather than by analogy.
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10
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Highway 444
Building Canada’s northern backbone. A white paper proposing a 50-year nation-building corridor for Ontario — Hamilton to the Manitoba border, with a far-northern extension and a southwestern housing corridor. Water-anchored communities, dedicated passenger rail, district energy, and the governance to deliver it.
The series runs to eleven papers. Ten are above; 11 is still to be posted here. They reference each other by number, so reading order is worth knowing — Four and Five are a pair, for instance: Four is the builder class that left the industry, Five is what moved in after them.
A standalone paper.
Written separately from Building Forward, on its own question.
Every one of these papers ends at the same problem.
We have built an industry that can produce an enormous paper record of process, and almost no durable record of what was actually built, by whom, on what day. InPresentia is the narrow, practical version of that argument: photos, deficiencies and progress tied to a real place on a real plan, timestamped, and still there in five years.