Future of Infrastructure Group Round Table 2026

On March 13, 2026, I had the opportunity to join a roundtable in Ottawa sponsored by the Future of Infrastructure Group (FIG) and ARUP. The roundtable followed the release earlier this year of FIG's white paper on the adoption of digital twins for Canadian infrastructure. The conversation was inspiring, and at times, candid, even when circling problems we've been hearing about for decades.

A few things stood out. First, the room agreed on something that still gets lost in broader discourse. A digital twin is not a product you buy, it's a methodology. A way of structuring how information moves across the lifecycle of an asset so that the people who need it can actually find it and use it. While the technology is not trivial, it's also not the limiting factor. The bottleneck is aligning data schemas, building governance frameworks, and navigating the politics of sharing information across organizations that have every incentive not to. That's where the conversation kept returning: the human and institutional architecture around digital twins.

Canada's federated governance makes this especially difficult. The case studies we tend to look at (common examples being the UK's National Digital Twin Programme and Singapore's Integrated Digital Delivery) were built within unitary or city-state structures. Replicating their coordination in a country with intersecting federal, provincial, territorial, municipal, and Indigenous jurisdictions requires mechanisms that don't yet exist, and that the current roadmap doesn't fully address.

The second outstanding issue was upskilling which is not experienced equally across the sector. Major firms are already embedding digital workflows into delivery. But Canada's construction sector is built on small and medium enterprises (SMEs), with the average company having fewer than seven employees. This segment accounts for 50% of GDP. The report recommends strategic, operational, and technical training tracks, but doesn't say who funds them, who delivers them, or what the minimum viable curriculum looks like. Until we understand what it actually costs an SME to reach digital delivery readiness, any mandate is built on assumptions rather than evidence. Digital Built Ontario aims to collect evidence around this challenge in a series of workshops later this year, in an effort to support digitalization and its benefits across our entire industry.

What struck me most, though, was what the report left out. Universities and research centres are barely mentioned, despite being one of the primary pipelines for both R&D and workforce training in digital infrastructure. This is a significant blind spot. Universities and research centres can absorb risk that government and industry often cannot, allowing the testing of unproven approaches on real-world assets, iterating on open standards, and training the workforce before the market demands it. As an example, at our research group at the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS), we have been doing exactly that: building an open-source digital twin platform, implementing ISO 19650 with industry partners, and preparing students to work across disciplinary boundaries. Partnering with academia lets the public and private sector pressure-test digital approaches at low cost, without embedding unproven technology in live procurement. The FIG roadmap would be stronger if it connected explicitly to that ecosystem and to the federal and provincial funding pathways that already exist to support it. Tri-Council grants, Mitacs partnerships, and NRC challenge programs are examples of mechanisms that are funded, accessible, and largely underused by the AECO industry. The infrastructure for collaboration is already there. What's missing is the connection between the research being done and the policy being written.

None of these challenges exist because the sector lacks technology, talent, or ambition. Those pieces are there. The challenges persist because they need coordination, and coordination needs leadership. The FIG report demonstrates that success rates jump from 30% to 80% when leadership is committed and empowered. 

The industry needs the professionals who aren't waiting for a mandate, but are actively stepping up to drive this transformation. If you are currently steering digital delivery, or if you have the ambition to shape the future of Ontario’s built environment, let's talk.