Purpose
The Council and its members are driven by a core purpose: To shape the future of Canada’s infrastructure and services by delivering value to Canadians through partnerships between the public and private sectors. The result? Hundreds of projects shaping our nation and delivering long-term benefits for our communities and economy for more than three decades.
The Council and its members champion infrastructure partnership models that support the long-term alignment of incentives through the inclusion of private capital to appropriately transfer risk, drive innovation and efficiencies, and consider the full life cycle of an asset. These models also leverage the discipline and expertise of the private sector to deliver, operate and maintain assets with enduring public value.
We must anchor our work in these fundamental strengths that have underpinned the success of Canada’s infrastructure industry, while adapting to new market realities through continuous improvement. Guided by these core principles, we can reliably deliver projects while also integrating lessons learned over the last three decades to modernize our approach.
Canada’s infrastructure ambitions are growing faster than the traditional ability to deliver. Major projects are becoming larger and more complex, while fiscal constraints, labour shortages, and supply chain pressures continue to intensify. To meet Canada’s economic, energy, housing, transportation, and defence objectives, governments need access to a broader range of delivery models capable of bringing certainty, innovation, and private sector capacity to project delivery.
For our country and communities to continue to grow, we must build more, faster and with greater ambition and partnership than ever before. It’s time to dig deeper in the procurement toolkit, to broaden the range of models that use private finance and evolve their structures. By innovating on approaches that harness the best of what we are known for, we can address the industry’s ongoing challenges and empower us to be nimbler in these uncertain times.
Plan
The Council is building on what works, improving what doesn’t and drawing on global best practices to expand and refine the tools in Canada’s procurement toolkit. Canada cannot become a global energy superpower, double non-US exports by 2035, reinvigorate defence and security capabilities and adequately address its housing and broader affordability crisis, while continuing to deliver essential infrastructure and services, without considering every available procurement option.
By expanding the umbrella of partnership models with the private sector, the Council aims to help governments unlock private capital, drive innovation and bring execution speed and certainty to complex projects across every region of Canada, realizing the full potential of private sector involvement in infrastructure delivery.
Action
The Council is grounding this work in the four core attributes that have defined successful infrastructure partnerships for over thirty years:
Our research will evaluate delivery models against these proven criteria, ensuring that new approaches maintain the discipline and reliability that define successful infrastructure partnerships. Expanding this umbrella includes engagement across both the public and private sectors and the development of the Council’s Procurement Toolkit.
The Procurement Toolkit will help provide governments with a practical framework for identifying, evaluating, and selecting the delivery model best suited to a project’s objectives, risk profile, and complexities. By broadening the range of partnership models available to decision makers, the Toolkit will help ensure governments can access the full spectrum of procurement and delivery approaches needed to accelerate project delivery, unlock innovation, attract private capital, focus on value-optimizing elements, and improve outcomes for Canadians.
Canada’s Infrastructure Conference 2026 is an important part of these crucial discussions, setting the stage for collaborative work into the new year to strengthen and accelerate Canada’s project pipeline by expanding knowledge of how the public and private sectors can collaborate.
