Canada’s $1.2 trillion construction pipeline, by sector and province

There are 4,626 major capital projects currently proposed or under construction in Canada, worth $1.2 trillion combined. They are published by six different government inventories, in two languages, with forty different words for “sector”. Put them in one table and two things become obvious that no single inventory shows: Ontario has by far the most projects and nowhere near the most money, and two-thirds of the entire pipeline sits in 542 projects.

Ontario has 1,768 active projects, more than any other province and 66% more than Alberta. But Alberta’s pipeline is worth twice as much, and British Columbia’s is worth more than twice as much. BC carries $449 billion of active work across 1,022 projects; Ontario carries $206 billion across 1,768.

The gap is not a measurement artefact, it is what the provinces build. Ontario’s inventory is dominated by schools, community facilities, road resurfacing and municipal grants: high counts, modest cheques. Alberta and BC’s are dominated by LNG terminals, pipelines, mines and power generation, where a single project can carry more capital than a hundred schools. Newfoundland makes the point in miniature: 14 active projects, $38.7 billion, an average of $2.8 billion each.

Energy and industrial projects account for 542 of 4,626 active projects, 12% of the count. They account for $764 billion of $1.2 trillion, 64% of the value.

That eleven-fold gap between median and mean is the whole shape of the dataset. Half of Canada’s active major projects are under $43 million, ordinary institutional and municipal work. The average is dragged upward by a short list of enormous ones: 212 projects of $1 billion or more, and ten projects that alone carry roughly $290 billion.

Of the 4,626 active projects, 2,453 are proposed and 2,094 are under construction. That split matters more than the headline total. A proposed nuclear plant and a nuclear plant with cranes on site are both “in the pipeline”, but only one of them is buying concrete this year. Any read of this data that does not separate the two will overstate near-term demand by roughly half.

None of the above requires new information. Every project here is published by a government. The difficulty is that they are published by six separate inventories: Ontario Builds, Alberta Major Projects, the BC Major Projects Inventory, Quebec’s Plan québécois des infrastructures, the federal NRCan inventory, and Toronto’s pre-tender capital pipeline. Each uses its own schema, its own status words, and its own units. Five publish cost in millions; one publishes dollars.

The sector labels are the worst of it. Across those six sources there are forty distinct sector strings, in both official languages, including three case variants of the same Quebec category. “Transit” and “Transport collectif” are the same sector. So are “Health care” and “Santé et Services sociaux”. Group by the raw label and you get forty answers to a twelve-answer question, with the French half of health care missing from your total.

Counts are of projects marked proposed, under construction, or on hold as of 26 July 2026; completed and cancelled projects are excluded. Value totals include only projects whose source publishes a capital cost, which is roughly 60% of them, so every figure here understates the real pipeline. Costs are as published by the responsible government and are not adjusted for inflation or escalation. Toronto’s pre-tender pipeline publishes value bands rather than figures, so it contributes projects but no dollars. The federal NRCan inventory re-lists projects the provinces already publish (Woodfibre LNG appears in both the BC and federal registers), so a project counted in two inventories is counted once here, keeping the more complete filing; that removes about 100 rows and $81 billion of double-counting.

The full dataset is queryable: major projects covers all 9,221 distinct records including completed work, and every sector above links to its own page. The API serves the same data with cost, proponent, status and coordinates.