How we build has not kept pace.

Canada does not lack builders, land or demand. It lacks a way of building that keeps up. Residential construction produces less per hour worked than it did in 2000, a development approval takes the better part of a year, an apartment building takes nearly two years to complete in the largest cities, and the cost of building has risen more than three times as fast as prices in general. Each of these is a measure of method, not of will, and method is what can change.

Less built per hour

Output per hour in Canadian residential construction was 8% lower in 2024 than in 2000 (Centre for the Study of Living Standards, December 2025). The decline was not steady: productivity rose by 1.5% a year between 2008 and 2019, then fell by 3.8% a year from 2019 to 2024. The Centre estimates that lost productivity added between $6 billion and $7.7 billion to the cost of new housing over those five years, 15 to 20% of the increase. Most of the economy produces more per hour than it did a generation ago. Homebuilding produces less.

Most of a Canadian home is still built in the open, one trade after another, on a site that stops for weather and waits for the next crew. The work has grown more demanding, with higher energy standards and denser buildings, while the way it is organised has barely changed.

Months before the first shovel, years before the keys

Time compounds cost. Across 23 municipalities, a development application took an average of 11.2 months to complete over 2022 to 2024, from 2 months in Saskatoon to 31 months in Hamilton (Altus Group for the Canadian Home Builders' Association, March 2025). Once started, an apartment building in Canada's six largest metropolitan areas took 22.7 months on average to complete in 2023, and 33.3 months in Toronto (CMHC, Spring 2024). Every month of approval and construction is carried by financing, by land held idle and by a household still waiting for a home.

Costs that outrun the economy

The residential building construction price index rose 69% between 2019 and 2025, against 21% for consumer prices over the same years (Statistics Canada; Doorway calculation from annual averages). Part of that is the cost of materials and labour, which no single firm controls. Part of it is the productivity loss above, which comes down to how the work is done. A home that costs more to build has to rent or sell for more, or it does not get built.

The method is the lever

The three measures point the same way. More of the home should be made under a roof, to tight tolerances, while the site is prepared: walls, floors and whole modules produced in a plant and assembled in a fraction of the time. Repeating proven designs across projects shortens approvals and lets each project learn from the last. None of this is new technology. What has been missing is the volume and the capital to run it at scale.

On 14 September 2025 the federal government launched Build Canada Homes with an initial $13 billion investment (Government of Canada, September 2025). It acts as a developer and a financier, and it states a preference for construction done in factories. The country has chosen the method. It now needs partners who can deliver it.

A parallel clock

Hopewell has built in Canada since 1990: more than 10,000 homes, along with the industrial and commercial space and the property management that a group of operating companies brings with it (Source: Hopewell Group, 2026). In 2019 it began investing in how building itself changes, through Groundbreak Ventures, its construction-technology affiliate. Nobody at the firm foresaw the policy. The firm was doing the work for its own reasons, in its own markets, when the country decided it wanted the same thing done at national scale. Prepared, not prescient.

Keeping pace

Doorway is how the Hopewell group extends that work across the country: provincial construction partners who already build faster and more predictably, private capital to deliver at scale, and a builder that answers for what a door costs. How Canada builds has not kept pace. It can catch up.