Senior leaders from EllisDon, Pomerleau, and Bird Construction sat down on the Atlantic Construction Podcast and — unusual for three firms that bid against each other — spent over an hour agreeing on the same thing: lump-sum is a cost floor, not a ceiling, and the market is moving past it.
The roundtable in Episode 73 brought together Travis Rudolph, chief estimator at EllisDon's Atlantic team; Vivek Tomar, director of strategic proposals and pursuits at Pomerleau; and Rick Buhr, director of design and key accounts at Bird Construction Atlantic. None of them came from the industry directly — Rudolph started as a gym teacher, Buhr spent fifteen years as an architect at FBM before crossing to the construction side, Tomar came up through environmental and civil consulting at SNC-Lavalin. Three different angles on the same market. Three identical conclusions.
The headline is worth sitting with: on a busy day in Atlantic Canada construction, three normally-competing national GCs told a public audience where they think the industry is going — collaborative delivery, shared risk, and the right team over lowest price. That doesn't happen often.
Lump-sum only looks like certainty
The case against lowest-price lump-sum isn't philosophical — it's mechanical. When a contractor bids a complete set of documents, every ambiguity in those drawings becomes a change-order negotiation once work starts. The incentives point one way: recover margin through the change process. As Rudolph put it plainly, "lumsum world is that's your cost minimum it just goes up from there" — the bid number is where costs start, not where they finish.
The problem is compounded by timing. By the time a contractor sees a fully-designed project on the street, the decisions that shape cost — structural system, MEP approach, site logistics — are already locked. You bid what the drawings say, not what you'd build if you'd been asked earlier. You can't suggest a better structural bay because the architect is finished. You can't flag that a certain mechanical system will add months to the schedule because the schedule is already attached to the contract.
Rick Buhr framed the loss plainly: "you miss the opportunity for Value engineering construc build reviews schedule reviews" — once design is done, the only lever left is the contingency.
What early involvement actually means
The alternative the panel described isn't a single delivery model — it's a principle: bring the constructor in while decisions can still be changed. The specific vehicle varies: integrated project delivery (IPD), construction management (CM), progressive design-build. Each structures the relationship differently, but all share the same logic.
On the construction management side, Vivek Tomar described the Pomerleau approach on the Atlantic Science Enterprise Centre (ASEC) in Moncton — a federal project consolidating DFO, Environment and Climate Change Canada, NRC, and CFIA into a single adaptive-reuse lab complex. The ASEC contract structure, confirmed by Public Services and Procurement Canada, awarded the CM role to Pomerleau at $5.8 million alongside a $23.6 million architecture contract to Diamond Schmitt (in association with EXP) in October 2021. The key structural move: "both contracts were wed at the same time so that The Architects and engineers and construction manager can start... at the same time" — not sequentially. Not design-then-price. Simultaneously.
From there, Tomar described CM as a series of cost checkpoints rather than a single bid: "at around 33% design we come in do a quick Constructor Builder review and an estimate 66% 99% 100%". At each stage the owner can see the budget trajectory and steer — adding scope here, pulling back there — before anything is cast in concrete, literally or contractually.
IPD takes a different structure. Bird Construction is delivering the Halifax Water Burnside Operations Depot — a new consolidated facility on a 14-acre site in Dartmouth replacing four dispersed depots — under an IPD multi-party agreement as part of a Bird-Chandos Joint Venture. The IPD team includes Group2 Architecture, FBM, CBCL, and Atlantica Mechanical Contractors. What makes IPD distinct from CM is the incentive structure: "it's a profit pool on top of the hard costs... everyone's going to win or everyone's going to lose" — every party's upside is tied to the project outcome. There is no adversarial recovery play.
The constraint nobody talks about enough: the client
Every person on the panel flagged the same limit on collaborative models: the owner has to be ready for them. IPD in particular demands a different kind of client engagement than traditional procurement. You can structure the contract perfectly and still watch it struggle if the owner can't operate at the pace the model requires.
Buhr was direct about this: "you need a really educated informed engaged client that can be at every meeting that can make good decisions quick decisions". A large institutional client with fifteen approval layers isn't built for that. An organization that polls twenty people before signing a drawing revision is a poor fit for IPD even if the idea appeals to them.
The same discipline applies to the trade partners. Collaborative delivery doesn't just need a willing owner — it needs subcontractors and designers who are actually willing to work differently. "you want subcontractors that are wired to be creative that are wired to be at the table" — a mechanical sub that shows up to price a complete set and leaves isn't a useful IPD partner. The panel's consistent point was that the model selection is only the beginning; team selection is where the outcome is decided: "we have to pick your team well in advance of who is the designers who Consultants or who some of your key trades".
The MEP blind spot
One of the more useful observations in the episode came from Buhr's experience crossing from architecture into construction: design discussions habitually over-focus on architecture and under-scrutinize mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. His framing was blunt: "we'd spend 95% of the time talking about architecture and a 5% talking about structure mechanical electrical" — on many projects, MEP is 40 to 50 percent of the construction budget. The math doesn't support the attention ratio.
This matters especially in renovation work, where the building envelope is constrained and the systems are the primary cost lever. Buhr described a Saint Mary's University mechanical renovation where that imbalance had real consequences. The lesson for early contractor involvement: insist that MEP consultants are at the table at the same checkpoints as the architect, and cost them with the same rigor.
The corollary on sustainability: collaborative models create an opening to set energy and carbon targets early and hold them. The panel's recommended approach was to name the priorities explicitly at the project's outset — "what are the price prorities here... is it net zero project and you can set those goals and targets and then you hold those sacred" — and then find savings elsewhere rather than trading away the sustainability goals when budgets get tight.
The market conditions that are accelerating all of this
The three firms aren't advocating for collaborative delivery out of altruism. The market is pushing them toward it.
Atlantic Canada runs on relationships. It is a small, tight region where careers overlap and reputations travel. As Rudolph put it: "your reputation precedes you... everybody in frederickton knows what you're doing or how that's going". And clients in this market want proof that is local, not national. "they really want to know what have you done locally" — a strong project track record in Vancouver or Calgary doesn't close a deal in Halifax or Moncton.
Add to that the current labour and backlog situation. All three firms described record backlogs at the time of the episode. That scarcity changes the calculus: "the bigger the backlog the less you can look at and take on which is a good problem for us to have". When you can be selective about what you build, you choose the work where your capabilities earn the most — and collaborative models reward the technical depth that large GCs carry. The internal constructibility experts, logistics teams, and research functions that bigger firms maintain are difficult to justify on a lump-sum commodity bid but are exactly the value-add that a CM or IPD team is paying for. As Tomar put it: "they all got these different departments in the background that might help out with constructibility or construction Sciences".
The evaluation frameworks are catching up too. Federal mandates now require roughly 5% Indigenous benefits on applicable projects, per federal government policy (independently verified). Dalhousie University's best-value evaluation model and Nova Scotia's median-fee scoring approach both reward teams for technical quality and methodology, not just fee. "now it's not just about the price on the evaluations they've got all these other metrics". Under pure lowest-price evaluation, every firm scored nearly identically on technical merit and it always came down to fee — "they'd score every technically almost identically so it always came down to fee". Best-value evaluation makes the argument for bringing more to the table.
For anyone selling construction management services to a hesitant owner: "we'll save you far more than you'll ever spend on us that's my sales pitch". One avoided design error in a $50 million building is worth more than the CM fee many times over.
What comes next
The episode closed on two signals. The first was P3 — public-private partnership — which the panel noted is quietly returning to Atlantic Canada after a long absence. The second was offshore prefab. Rick Buhr described seeing overseas manufacturing facilities producing building systems at scale, "they were cranking up Building Systems... buildings the size of a couple of football fields and have a handful of people". The labour arithmetic in Atlantic Canada, where trades are scarce and backlogs are long, makes factory-produced components an increasingly attractive answer.
Both threads point in the same direction: the delivery models that reward early integration, shared incentives, and technical depth are going to keep gaining ground. Three large competing GCs said so, on the record, at the same time.
Guests: Travis Rudolph (EllisDon Corporation), Vivek Tomar (Pomerleau Inc.), Rick Buhr (Bird Construction Inc.) — Episode 73 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Featured businesses: EllisDon Corporation · Bird Construction · Pomerleau · FBM Architecture. Receipt sources: Halifax Water Burnside IPD announcement · ASEC Moncton contract award · Canada Indigenous procurement mandate.