Listen Anywhere
There’s a version of this conversation that gets sanitized, filtered through a publicist, and turned into a press release about “exciting investments in the skilled trades workforce.” And then there’s the version Manny has in parking lots, on job sites, and in unscheduled Sunday phone calls with contractors who needed somewhere to say what they actually think.
Episode 68 of The Deconstruction Podcast was the second kind.
Manny, host of the Construction Life podcast and the person behind the upcoming Red and True national tour, spent well over an hour talking with Kosta and Johny about what’s actually happening in Canadian construction. It wasn’t a highlight reel. It was retention, development fees, gatekeepers with clean hard hats, and why 1.5 million tradespeople haven’t found a way to move together yet.
The Retention Problem Nobody Will Name
Manny’s been saying this for a while and keeps getting met with blank stares: the number one problem in Canadian construction right now isn’t a labor shortage. It’s retention.
People are getting into trades already planning their exit. They’re entering with an expiration date in mind, counting down to when they leave, and nobody in any position of influence is asking why. No politician, no guidance counselor, no construction media figure is framing it as a retention crisis.
His comparison is worth sitting with: you don’t go on a road trip and spend the whole time thinking about the final stop. The value is in the entire trip. When someone enters construction already thinking “I’ll do this for five years and get out,” they’re skipping the whole trip. The skills don’t compound, the mentorship chain breaks, and the industry loses people who had the potential to actually improve it.
The frustrating part, from Manny’s perspective, is that this is a solvable problem if people with reach would talk about it directly. Instead, the same recycled conversation about labor shortages gets rehashed with different statistics each year, and the underlying cause gets ignored.
600% and Nobody’s Asking the Question
Development fees in Canada have increased roughly 600% over the past 11 years. Wages haven’t. Materials haven’t. But before a developer can even begin the permit process in some cities, they’re looking at a six-figure bill just to start.
The result is predictable: developers crunch the numbers, realize the project doesn’t pencil out, and shelve it. When projects don’t start, laborers don’t work. When laborers don’t work, the downstream problems — income instability, workforce drift, businesses closing — follow in order.
What makes this particularly frustrating is who controls development fees. Municipal governments set them, but it’s provincial and federal politicians who make announcements about housing affordability. The people talking about the problem aren’t the ones responsible for it, and the ones responsible aren’t being held accountable by anyone.
Manny’s argument: municipalities got addicted to development fees as a way to offset their own budget mismanagement, kept raising them annually, and now the construction industry is paying for decisions that have nothing to do with construction. The solution, in his view, isn’t a temporary reduction or a seasonal relief program. It’s eliminating them, or at minimum, applying them only in cases where new infrastructure genuinely needs to be built.
This matters because construction is an economic stimulant. When a development goes up, it employs workers, generates payroll tax, drives material purchases, and creates business for dozens of trade companies. Killing the start kills all of that downstream activity. The fee doesn’t just affect the developer — it ripples across every sub-trade who was counting on that work.
Media Training Has No Place on a Job Site
One of the sharpest observations in this episode is about how construction’s public voice has become curated.
Anyone who spends time on construction sites knows within seconds whether the person they’re talking to has actually been on one. The inflection, the specificity, the way they describe a problem. You can’t fake it. But the people speaking on behalf of the construction industry at a government or association level — the ones with the pristine hard hats and the scripted talking points — often don’t have it.
Manny’s critique isn’t just that they’re out of touch. It’s that scripted voices make problems impossible to solve. You can’t word-salad your way to a solution. If you train someone to talk around an issue using the right keywords, the issue just sits there while everyone nods.
Real tradespeople, by contrast, tend to go quiet the more they want to share. They’ll sit in a site meeting and say nothing, not because they have nothing to say, but because there’s no actual invitation to say it. That’s the gap Red and True is trying to close.
What Red and True Actually Is
The short version: a national tour across all 10 Canadian provinces, boots on the ground, microphone in front of the people who are actually building the country.
The longer version is that Manny has been doing this long enough to know what a rehearsed answer sounds like versus a real one. The whole point of being physically present on a job site or in a small town shop is to capture what a studio call never would. The inflections, the pauses, the things people communicate when they’re not saying a word.
What he’s finding in the early conversations is that the problems are consistent regardless of region. People are worried about next month. They’re uncertain about 2027. They feel like no one with a platform is actually asking them what’s going on. And they’re right — the people asking the questions are usually giving the answers instead.
The $1,000 backer tier is structured partly as a tax write-off (marketing and promotion spend against business income for the year), partly as IP ownership, and mostly as a way to put the project in the hands of the industry it’s for. After being turned down by government programs and brands that privately told him they weren’t sure they wanted to invest in Canada right now, going directly to contractors made sense.
Johny framed it well: this is less than a dollar per construction worker in Canada. 1.5 million people. If a fraction of them got behind it, the project funds itself and the industry has something it’s never really had — a raw, unfiltered, nationwide document of what’s actually happening.
On the Ground vs. the Studio
There’s a reason Manny wants to do this in person across 200+ interviews instead of via Zoom calls from a studio.
You can describe what’s happening in construction from a chair. You can have a good conversation about it. But you can’t replace being in the room, seeing how someone’s shoulders drop when you ask about cash flow, or how a foreman lights up when the topic turns to something they’ve figured out that actually works.
The construction site conversation is a specific thing. Different trades asking each other questions across disciplines. Electricians talking to plumbers talking to framers. Skills cross-pollinating. Problems being worked through without ego. Manny’s been part of enough of those conversations to know that the insight that comes out of them is qualitatively different from what comes out of a panel discussion with handlers in the room.
He’s not going to the big cities first. The small communities are where he expects to find people who will be most direct. Smaller circles, less to protect, more to say.
For construction businesses trying to stay on top of their jobs, quotes, and invoices while all of this is sorting itself out, Jobtable keeps everything in one place without the learning curve most software puts in front of tradespeople. 👉 Learn more at https://www.jobtable.com
What the Industry Needs to Decide
The construction workforce in Canada is 1.5 million people. That’s enough to create real pressure on the problems Manny is describing — development fees, retention, the scripted nonsense from people who’ve never set foot on an actual site. The workforce exists. The leverage exists.
What’s been missing is a document that gives the industry back its own voice. Not a government report. Not a union announcement. Not a brand’s press release about investment in skilled trades.
The question is whether 1.5 million people decide to move before the older generation of tradespeople is gone, or after.