LONGUEUIL, Que. — Part of the federal government’s answer to Canada’s housing crisis is a swath of cement, trees and scrub brush across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. Future residents of the new housing units in the suburb of Longueuil will benefit from waterfront views, easy access to one of Canada’s biggest cities and relative affordability.

The challenge will be building them in Quebec. The Canadian construction industry, beset with low productivity, is a major barrier for Build Canada Homes, the federal government’s agency tasked to increase housing availability across the country. The problem is particularly acute in Quebec, where job vacancies increased by 218 per cent between 2018 and 2023 and productivity has cratered by 16 per cent—nearly double the rate of neighbouring Ontario—between 2013 and 2023, according to a recent Conseil de l’innovation du Québec report.

Quebec’s construction industry is “haphazard,” said Conseil de l’innovation du Québec chief executive Luc Sirois, making it currently ill-equipped to take on Build Canada Homes’ challenge of erecting thousands of housing units quickly and inexpensively. “Ten years ago, we were scared to replace workers [through innovation]. Now, we just can’t find the workers to begin with,” Sirois said.

The Quebec government’s restrictive immigration policies have further starved the industry of workers, he added. The resulting increased labour costs are one of the reasons why the province saw the country’s largest increase in non-residential construction prices in the second quarter of 2025, according to a Statistics Canada report.  

The problem isn’t just individual workers, Sirois said, but an industry-wide reticence to innovate. Sirois points to the province’s sluggish rollout of Building Information Modeling (BIM), the computer modeling platform that streamlines project development and construction, as one example. Though widely adopted around the world, Quebec has yet to fully implement it. As a result, he said, “everything is done by hand, over the telephone, on scraps of paper.”

Pointe-de-Longueuil, as the Quebec project is known, is one of six Build Canada Homes sites across the country. Launched earlier this month, the federal agency aims to build “deeply affordable” homes at scale in cities, where issues like real estate prices and homelessness are more acute. The $13-billion initiative will seek partnerships with private industry and other stakeholders to design and construct the housing, with an emphasis on prefabricated units to decrease cost and increase production rates.

Yet the Pointe-de-Longueuil project has already left one key stakeholder in the dark. The land is owned by Canada Lands Company (CLC), the Crown corporation charged with managing the federal government’s real estate assets. In May, CLC and the Ville de Longueuil revealed plans to build 5,000 housing units on the site on 23 hectares of land, 20 per cent of which would be designated non-profit. 

Longueuil Mayor Catherine Fournier was unaware that the project had been transferred to Build Canada Homes until the federal government’s announcement earlier this month, and remains unaware whether the current project is the same as Longueuil’s earlier announced effort. Nevertheless, Fournier said she was “delighted” that the agency chose Longueuil, where rent prices have increased by 58 per cent between 2018 and 2024.  

The Build Canada Homes parcel is part of the larger Pointe-de-Longueuil project, and the federal government will respect the May 2025 vision for the site, Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada spokesperson Keaton Wong told The Logic. An artist’s rendering of the original plan has Pointe-de-Longueuil studded with highrises and low-slung apartment buildings. Green space and trees dominate the tip jutting out into the St. Lawrence River, with access to a beach and bike paths.

That vision feels somewhat distant given the current state of the site. On a recent visit, bulldozers and earth movers were breaking up a field of concrete on Pointe-de-Longueuil’s northern tip. The scrap of land is largely made up of backfill from the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, the nearby Longueuil Metro station and two highways passing just to the south, according to Gilles Beauchamp, 77, who was about to put his electric powered kayak into the river. 

Beauchamp has swum and fished in and around Pointe-de-Longueuil for much of his life, and while he said the water is clean, the land around it isn’t. In 2020, an environmental assessment found hydrocarbons and asbestos. Regardless, Beauchamp said he will miss the Pointe-de-Longueuil’s unruly patches of nature, including the hardwoods that have managed to grow despite what’s in the ground beneath. “Bastard trees,” he calls them, with a certain reverence.