Evidence
Two kinds, and we hold ourselves to the same standard on both.
The first is the public record: what has actually happened to Canadian owners when information did not travel. Every figure comes from a judicial inquiry, an auditor general, an independent review or a court filing. Where the record offers a range, we use the lower bound and footnote the range.
The second is our own delivery record.
We are not interested in telling stories that paint individual public servants as villains. Every case here was delivered by competent people under real constraints. The pattern is structural, not personal.
Half one · The public record
What standing still has cost
Four provinces, nearly two decades, and almost $300 million of measurable public-record cost — across the four areas most municipalities spend the most on: buildings, roads, bridges and waterworks.
Every figure below is sourced to a public document, and where the record offers a range we use the lower bound and footnote the range. The four cases and their figures are set out in the table, so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
| Case | Asset class | Cost impact | Time lag | Dominant root cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vancouver Olympic Village | Mixed-use buildings | ~$169M loss (figures vary by analyst) | — | Risk transfer without monitoring; in-camera governance; design changes in email |
| Hamilton Red Hill Valley Parkway | Urban expressway | ~$24M rehabilitation, plus ~$26M inquiry | 6 years of information lag | Asset data not linked to escalation; safety-relevant finding lost in a silo |
| Edmonton Walterdale Bridge | Steel through-arch bridge | ~$23M overrun | ~2 years | Transcontinental fabrication without a shared information environment |
| Halifax wastewater treatment plant | Wastewater treatment | ~$54M repair | 14 months offline | Commissioning tested components, not integrated failure scenarios |
Hamilton, Ontario · Roads
Red Hill Valley Parkway
A friction test report reached senior staff and then sat for six years.
Red Hill Valley Parkway Inquiry, Final Report, November 2023
Waterloo, Ontario · Buildings
RIM Park
Council saw 4.73%. The executed contract said 9.2%.
Sills Judicial Inquiry into RIM Park financing, 2003
Halifax, Nova Scotia · Waterworks
Harbour Solutions plant
Commissioning tested the components, not the failure.
Halifax Water and Nova Scotia Environment regulatory filings
Edmonton, Alberta · Bridges
Walterdale Bridge
The fabricator and the design team were not working from the same model.
City of Edmonton project briefings and Council reports
Half two · Our delivery record
Field-tested across federal Canada
The disciplines that anchor the Clarity Builders model were proven on national engagements — change management before construction management, people before pixels, evidence throughout.
Building Canada's digital foundation
Departments worked in silos on analog, document-based processes — against an industry backdrop in which 95.5% of all data captured goes unused (FMI, Big Data = Big Questions for the Engineering and Construction Industry, 2018). Three parallel workstreams established a three-tier governance model, a Charter Member programme of internal champions, and a national platform that went from soft launch in July 2018 to production in September 2018.
True transformation here was a cultural challenge before it was a technical one — so the work began with people, not platforms.
Modernizing national infrastructure
A major Canadian federal department putting the management of critical real-property data on a standardized, digital footing. Operations staff had been doing what one leader called "data archaeology" — digging through binders, uncoordinated files and disconnected systems, losing information at every handover.
The client extended the mandate from three workstreams to four, and from 13 deliverables to 18.
If a regional detachment's priority is to fix a leaking roof, they have zero capacity to care about abstract directives concerning data schemas.
Operational leader, discovery phase. The department is deliberately unnamed.
Updating Canada's BIM playbook
Producing the detailed guidance for the National Research Council's updated Canadian Practice Manual for BIM, aligned to ISO 19650 Parts 1–6. The barriers were organizational rather than technical: cultural resistance, skills gaps, competing commercial interests and liability uncertainty.
Clarity Builders, working through its parent company Publivate Inc., created and manages the National Steering Committee — four working groups divided into 15 teams, governed by rough consensus requiring a supermajority across six stakeholder categories, so no single interest group can dominate the standard.