The Pearson Centre is pleased to share this op-ed from Frédérique Tsai-Klassen and Emily Feairs, Founders of Power Shift. Power Shift is a national thought-leadership series convening women at the heart of Canada’s political, economic, and institutional future.
Across politics, defence and security, infrastructure, construction, energy, and resources, women are stepping into positions of power. But attracting, retaining, and advancing that talent is not a symbolic objective — it is a strategic necessity.
The sectors in which governments are now making significant long-term investments are those where women’s participation remains lowest.
Canada is entering a decade that will be defined by change and growth.
Across housing, infrastructure, energy, and defence, the scale of ambition is generational. Governments are committing capital. Industry is mobilizing. Expectations—both global and domestic—are rising. The challenge now is translating that ambition into delivery. This next phase of growth will be defined, in practical terms, by Canada’s ability to build—at scale and at speed.
The federal government’s Spring Economic Update recognizes that challenge and seeks to build workforce capacity. Through initiatives such as Team Canada Strong, the Build Canada Apprenticeship Service, and expanded training through the Canadian Armed Forces, it takes a necessary step toward strengthening the skilled trades pipeline.
This ambitious investment will not be sufficient on its own. There is a growing gap between what Canada has set out to build, and the capacity required to deliver it.
The sectors in which governments are now making significant long-term investments like construction, infrastructure, energy, defence are those where women’s participation remains lowest. This is not a marginal gap requiring incremental improvement; rather, it is a structural constraint shaping the limits of Canada’s delivery capacity.
Women represent approximately 15 per cent of the construction workforce in Canada, and closer to five per cent on job sites. In the defence and security sector, roughly 25 per cent of the workforce are women. In the energy sector, women’s share of the labour force remains stubbornly around 21 per cent.
These figures have remained largely unchanged for decades, despite sustained attention and targeted initiatives.
This creates a fundamental misalignment.
Canada is attempting to scale delivery capacity in sectors that are drawing from a narrow and relatively static segment of the labour pool. In practical terms, this limits not only the number of workers available, but the depth of experience, range of perspectives, and leadership capacity within those systems.
Framed this way, the issue is not one of representation: it is a question of system performance and strategic capacity.
The federal measures announced focus, appropriately, on entry points: increasing awareness of the trades, reducing barriers to apprenticeship, and creating clearer pathways from education into employment.
These interventions address real constraints.
However, they operate primarily at the front end of the system. Just as importantly, we need to look at what happens after. Do women stay? Do they advance? Are they welcomed into the culture of sectors that have historically been shaped without them in mind?
In this context, increasing entry without addressing these downstream dynamics risks reinforcing a cycle in which participation expands at the margins but does not translate into sustained capacity.
Attrition at early and mid-career stages reduces the return on initial training investments. Limited access to advancement opportunities constrains the development of experienced talent. Informal networks and norms continue to influence who is seen as credible, promotable, or “fit” for leadership roles.
These are not peripheral issues: they are structural conditions that determine whether talent stays and whether it scales.
Organizations that will outperform in the coming decade will not simply be those that invest more capital. They will be those that can fully mobilize their talent (across experience levels, disciplines, and perspectives) and align it to operational realities.
This is not about representation for its own sake. It is about execution. Canada cannot meet its ambitions with only part of its talent fully engaged.
Expanding access to the trades is a necessary step in addressing Canada’s workforce needs. However, if the goal is to build systems that deliver at scale, the focus cannot stop at access. It must extend to understanding and addressing the barriers that shape who enters, who stays, and who leads.
A broader strategy would place equal emphasis on the conditions that shape retention, progression, and leadership within these sectors.
That means examining the norms and cultures that define belonging in skilled trades.
It means rethinking training and workplace environments to reflect the realities of a broader workforce.
It means ensuring that advancement pathways are visible, accessible, and equitable.
Critically, it means placing women in roles where consequential decisions are made not just in the pipeline, but also around the table.
Canada is at a hinge moment. The ambition is real. The investment is real. But ambition and investment do not deliver projects. Systems do.
The question now is whether existing systems are capable of operating at full capacity or whether they continue to operate with built-in constraints, and remain structurally limited in how they draw on talent.
Without structural change, Canada risks under-delivering in a moment that demands execution.