Les Industries Bonneville Ltée

Gabrielle Bonneville

Construction Modernization Builder

Canada does not have a housing problem simply because we are not building enough homes. We have a housing problem because our capacity to build has not kept pace with our needs.

For too long, we have approached housing as a series of individual projects, each one designed, approved, financed and constructed almost independently from the next. That model has produced remarkable buildings, but it is increasingly difficult to scale. Today, Canada faces a housing shortage, a labour shortage and construction costs that continue to challenge affordability.

In my view, these conditions demand more than incremental improvements. They require us to fundamentally rethink how we build.

This is where modular construction has the potential to transform our industry. I am part of the fourth generation of a family business that has been building manufactured homes and buildings for more than 65 years. Although the construction industry has barely evolved over time, I still believe that industrialized construction represents one of the most important opportunities we have to significantly increase our country’s capacity to deliver housing.

History offers an interesting perspective. In countries where modular and industrialized construction became widely adopted, large-scale change often happened during periods of exceptional pressure, when labour was scarce, housing demand surged or conventional construction could no longer deliver at an affordable cost. Canada is now experiencing all three.

Modular construction is often discussed in terms of speed. And speed matters. By allowing factory production and site work to happen simultaneously, projects can be delivered significantly faster. But I believe the greatest opportunity is much bigger than building faster.

It is about building with greater certainty. In a controlled factory environment, quality can be monitored, processes can be repeated and continuously improved, and costs can become more predictable. This is particularly important for affordable and non-market housing, where organizations and governments are working with limited resources and cannot afford major cost overruns or unpredictable schedules.

I often compare this to aviation. When you board an airplane, you trust that its components were manufactured and assembled in a controlled environment by specialized professionals following rigorous quality-control protocols. You would not expect the aircraft to be assembled on the runway where it is about to take off.

Yet much of construction still happens in exactly that way. We build everything in the environment where the building must ultimately operate, while managing weather, labour availability, logistics and countless other variables.

"In a controlled factory environment, quality can be monitored, processes can be repeated and continuously improved, and costs can become more predictable."

Industrialization gives us the opportunity to bring more control to that process. But to unlock its full potential, we cannot continue to treat modular construction as something considered after a building has already been designed.

We need to design differently from the beginning. More importantly, I believe we need to think about housing differently, at a national level.

What if, instead of treating every housing project as a completely new exercise, we developed standardized building systems that could be deployed and adapted across communities? What if governments committed to sufficient volume to allow manufacturers, suppliers, contractors and trades to invest in capacity and expertise?

Standardization does not mean identical buildings. We can preserve architectural identity, adapt buildings to their communities and create beautiful places while standardizing the systems that make them efficient to manufacture and deliver.

That is where scale becomes transformative. With long-term volume, manufacturers can optimize production and supply chains. Materials can be purchased more strategically. Contractors can develop specialized expertise in site integration. Trades can refine their methods. And, over time, costs can begin to move in a different direction.

The automotive industry did not reduce costs by reinventing the car every time one was produced. It created systems, standards and volume, and continuously improved them.

Construction needs to learn from that model. I believe the future of modular construction is not about replacing traditional construction. It is about expanding what the entire industry can deliver. And that is the real opportunity before us.

Because ultimately, the factory is not the destination.

The destination is the community. We need more than faster construction. We need the capacity to build more homes, with greater quality, greater predictability and at a scale that can genuinely respond to Canada’s housing needs.

For me, that is what modular construction represents: not simply a different way to build buildings, but a different way to think about how we build communities.