This can help our national housing crisis and scale Canada’s advanced manufacturing sector, positioning our technology firms to compete in global markets.

It has become a familiar feature of neighbourhood life: building sites cluttered with machines and materials, open to the weather, and ringed by fencing that can’t hide the mud and mess. The whine of circular saws, the pistol-pop of nail guns, the beep of concrete trucks grinding into reverse.

Building everything on-site. Same as it ever was.

But the noise and waste coming from construction sites aren’t just irritants. They’re symptoms of a structural failure in how we build homes. Despite the urgency of Canada’s housing crisis, the vast majority of new homes are still constructed the same way they were 10, 25, even 50 years ago: with the same tools, the same choreography between multiple contractors, and the same delays.

Being locked into that conventional approach holds us back. We now take longer to build fewer homes, and at greater cost. Business as usual won’t get us the millions of houses and apartments Canada needs over the next decade.

Fortunately, solutions exist and many are already being deployed in Canada. By integrating advanced manufacturing with architecture and home-building, we can dramatically accelerate construction timelines, reduce costs, improve quality, and lower the industry’s environmental impact.

We already have automated factories producing wall, floor, and roof modules for rapid on-site assembly. 3D printers can fabricate panels to millimetre precision, accounting for complex layouts and reducing human error. Mass timber—a Canadian strength—offers a low-carbon alternative to concrete and steel for many low- and mid-rise buildings.

And digital design, assisted by artificial intelligence, is helping eliminate costly measurement mistakes and material waste.

Photo by Printerra

These aren’t futuristic dreams. They are the practical tools we must deploy to meet today’s targets. The federal government wants builders finishing half-a-million new homes annually within a decade. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates we’ll need to build between 430,000 and 480,000 homes every year to restore prices to pre-pandemic levels. That’s double our current output.

But federal and provincial government housing policies can’t focus solely on building faster. They need to ensure we build smarter. We need to cut costs by as much as 50 per cent in some segments to make housing more affordable again. We need to overcome a chronic shortage of skilled trades.

And we need to build better. Canadians want a housing boom that meets their expectations for quality. They want homes that reflect their specific needs, tastes, and design preferences.

Prefabricated housing does not have to mean conformity. Advanced manufacturing allows for architectural flexibility and variations from standardized designs, which is similar to the way car production offers personalized models without sacrificing the efficiencies of scale.

To get there, government housing policies must target more than just production volume. They need incentives that accelerate the adoption of advanced manufacturing technologies in home building, from funding technology demonstration projects to enforcing procurement strategies that require the integration of these technologies into the supply chain.

By doing so, we will not only solve a national housing crisis. This will help scale Canada’s advanced manufacturing sector, positioning our technology companies to compete in global markets.

So, how will we know when this transformation is taking place?

When we walk past that neighbourhood building site and see workers assembling houses and apartments, not building them from scratch. Quietly. Cleanly. And soon to be someone’s home.