Giovanni Cautillo, president of the Ontario General Contractors Association, explains how collective action keeps contractors alive: a tender-review service that changes brutal contract terms, a school-to-job pipeline filling the supervision gap, and the technology argument that pays for itself on a single school-board reno.
The contract arrives, you read the indemnification clause, and it has no upper limit and no time limit. That means an owner can come back to you at any point in the future and make you liable for anything. A single clause — unnoticed or accepted out of bid pressure — can wipe out a company that has been running cleanly for twenty years.
Giovanni Cautillo has seen it. He became president of the Ontario General Contractors Association in 2020, and the contract problem was waiting for him on day one. The OGCA represents about 200 members — from small family shops to billion-dollar builders — covering more than 70% of Ontario's Industrial, Commercial, and Institutional sector and over $14 billion in GDP. Its mandate since 1939 has been the same: take problems that isolate individual contractors and solve them together.
The throughline of his conversation on the Atlantic Construction Podcast is blunt. "sometimes you're isolated in your own geography and you think oh I'm the only one going through this" — but every GC across the country is going through the same thing. The pain points rhyme; the solutions can too.
What happens once you sign
Most contractors know the tender is where they lose before the job starts. The OGCA's contract-review service exists for exactly that moment. Members flag problem clauses confidentially; the association brings in its network of insurers, surety companies, and lawyers; and it submits anonymized pushback on behalf of the whole bidding pool.
The anonymity is the point. "we submit on behalf of the industry and all biders involved we never named the bidders" — no individual GC is exposed for questioning the owner's terms.
The economics run in both directions. "contractors price risk and if you make it riskier the higher the price right" — so the owner who piles risk onto contractors via the contract is paying for it, invisibly, in every bid they receive. That argument lands with procurement; the OGCA claims an 85% success rate changing terms in the contractor's favor.
The specific clauses the association pushes back on are instructive:
Price-validity windows. Owners sometimes demand GCs hold their prices for nine months after tender close. The problem: subcontractors are only guaranteeing prices for a fraction of that time. "we are as contractors are only getting uh price guarantees from our subs for up to 48 hours" in some cases. A contractor who accepts a long validity period is pricing that exposure — and bidding higher because of it. Shorten the validity window and bids come down.
Uncapped indemnification. Cautillo is direct about this one: "if remove the upper limitation on indemnification and the timeline that means that you know they can come back to you at any one time" — no limit, no expiry — that is unlimited exposure, and no business can adequately price it.
Unnecessary insurance. A stipulated-sum design-bid-build contract does not require errors-and-omissions coverage. "a stip sum doesn't require an Eno so let's let's remove that so that the contractor is not pricing something that they don't need to" — a clean clause-by-clause saving that most contractors don't push back on alone.
The meta-principle cuts through all of it: "once a contract is signed then you know the the provisions and whatnot that you have in there are somewhat locked in" — the time to fight is before you sign, not after. And an association gives a single contractor the standing to fight.
The right way to make money on a job
Behind the contract argument is a sharper view of the business. "you price a job you get in you do the job there are no problems you get paid you get out that's how a contractor makes money" — the contractor is not in the claims business. A job executed cleanly — on schedule, without disputes — is the whole model. Every clause that imports unnecessary uncertainty is a threat to that, and every clause the association removes is money saved before the first shovel goes in the ground.
The labour problem starts in kindergarten
The contract fight is winnable in months. The labour problem plays out over decades.
Cautillo's argument is that the perception damage started when shop classes were removed from schools. A generation of students was never shown what skilled trades look like from the inside. "we wanted to uh to get in there because um the removal of shops really put us back" — and fixing it means starting the conversation before high school, not at it.
The OGCA worked with Ontario's Minister of Labour on a campaign to introduce skilled-trades awareness from kindergarten onward, countering the cultural drift that positioned construction as a backup plan rather than a first choice. The technology angle matters here too: showing students what the industry actually looks like — "we've got Boston mechanics spot the dog on some of our job sites walking around and doing you know the readings" — reframes construction as a field where you can work alongside robotics, not instead of them.
The harder structural fix is the STEP to ICI Construction program, developed in partnership with the Toronto District School Board. Students are placed on ICI job sites for a semester, rotating through the trades. "they place them with each trade for about a week right so as they're they're experiencing you know these trades" — and at the end of the rotation, they know whether they want to pursue a credential. Critically, "the students know that there's placement and so there's a job at the end of the tunnel" — they're not exploring for exploration's sake.
The OGCA also built a Skills Development Fund supervision-bridging program: a funded initiative placing new graduates and newcomers into project-coordinator-to-manager roles, with a train-the-trainer toolkit for member companies' existing superintendents.
The supervisor shortage is a different problem
Filling the tools-in-hand workforce is one challenge. The supervision gap is another.
A wave of experienced site supervisors is retiring, taking institutional knowledge with them. What makes a good supervisor, in Cautillo's account, is less about technical knowledge than about temperament. "you need to be in in control of your emotions and if you if you haven't been taught or learned then your emotions are going to get the best of you" — the job-site flash point where everything falls apart.
The soft-skills argument cuts against how the industry has traditionally recruited into supervision: promoting the best tradesperson, regardless of whether they can manage people under pressure. What the industry needs, and what the OGCA's programs try to develop, is communication, problem-solving, and level-headedness.
On the institutional-knowledge side, the natural stopgap is already happening organically. Retired veterans are calling former employers asking to come back part-time. "can I even work for you part-time on site I'll help and communicate to the next goes I'm bored at home" — experienced people with nothing to prove, willing to transfer what they know.
BIM paid for itself on one school-board reno
The technology argument Cautillo makes is disarmingly simple: a small contractor on a school-board renovation job ran up a change-order volume large enough that, had they used Building Information Modeling, "had you done Bim it would have paid itself with just half that amount" — the back-end claims cost more than the front-end technology.
The reason most small contractors don't make this calculation is that the fear is priced in — not the tool. "general contract directors don't like unknowns we price risk" — and a new system is an unknown. The answer is not to dismiss that fear but to route around it: larger members who have already absorbed the pain of adoption can mentor smaller ones. "it's almost like an older sibling teaching a younger sibling you know the ropes type thing"
The upstream logic is that BIM and clash detection exist "to avoid the claims on the back end to fix it on the front end so that you know it's it's easier for us to get an adhere to schedule" — and a contractor who delivers on schedule, without disputes, is executing the only business model that reliably works.
For small and mid-size members — the firms the OGCA has explicitly refocused on — the equalizer argument matters most. "technology ends up being The Equalizer in all things all things being equal if you're that much more advanced on the tech side" — the small contractor who gets information off a job site faster than a competitor is competing with something that can't easily be matched.
The association as operating infrastructure
The OGCA's pitch to smaller contractors is concrete: larger firms already have internal lawyers, safety directors, and IT departments. "the larger contractors have um individuals who already work in their organizations internal lawyers" — the small contractor has the association, or they have nothing. The bulletins on indemnification and liquidated damages are not policy documents; they are negotiating ammunition for a firm that has no general counsel to pick up the phone.
"that's what our commodity is it's information you share information you raise you know the level of everyone" — the association doesn't protect members by restricting access to information — it creates value precisely by disseminating it.
For Atlantic Canada contractors wondering whether any of this crosses a provincial border: Cautillo's answer is that the pain points do. Ontario and Atlantic Canada GCs are going through the same contract terms, the same supervision shortage, the same resistance to technology. The OGCA offers itself as a resource — and the Canadian Construction Association connects the provincial bodies into a national network.
Guest: Giovanni Cautillo, President, Ontario General Contractors Association. Episode 72 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast, sponsored by Procore Technologies. Watch the full episode. Subcontractor price-validity source: OGCA (2021). STEP to ICI program: OGCA.