Lorin Robar, Ashwin Rajendran, and Emily Surette of Pomerleau sit down with ACP to walk through 15-plus years of regional growth: P3 healthcare delivery, a BIM stack that caught two dozen drawing conflicts before a bucket hit the ground, and the cultural onboarding program that holds a coast-to-coast firm together.
Pomerleau did not show up in Atlantic Canada the day they broke ground on the Cape Breton wastewater project. They have been active here since the 1970s, with a permanent regional office since 2003. That history matters — and it comes up early in the conversation, because host Daniel Arsenault assumes otherwise. Lorin Robar, who has been Regional Manager for Atlantic Canada since January 2018, sets the record straight without making a thing of it. That's the register of the whole episode: specific, direct, no resume-reading.
The three Pomerleau employees who join Dan — Robar, Project Director Ashwin Rajendran, and Talent Business Partner Emily Surette — cover a lot of ground in 51 minutes. What holds it together is a single underlying question: how does one of Canada's largest general contractors keep anything that resembles a family culture when it operates coast to coast across every delivery model the industry runs? The answer, it turns out, is more mechanical than you might expect.
Partner local when you go somewhere new
The Cape Breton Regional Hospital project is Pomerleau's biggest active job in the region at the time of the conversation: a seven-year construction management contract on a major hospital expansion in Sydney, N.S., held in joint venture with Lindsay Construction. The JV logic is straightforward. Pomerleau has a track record in healthcare and the delivery expertise; Lindsay has a Cape Breton office and the subcontractor relationships that come with years of local presence. "Pomerleau hasn't had a large presence in cape breton... certainly Lindsay is active there they have an office," Robar says.
That is not a confession of weakness. It is the operating logic a GC should apply when entering any new geography for a large institutional project: the local firm's relationships and market access are not a nice-to-have, they are the risk-management instrument. Competing with a strong local firm for that kind of scope, when a JV gives you both, is the worse path.
The Cape Breton labour market adds another wrinkle. With the hospital project, the Northside Community Hospital replacement, and several long-term care builds all running simultaneously in a relatively small area, trades are in short supply. "there'll be challenges with labour but yeah we're a resilient industry and we'll find a way," Robar says. The honest framing here is that resilience and advance subcontractor planning are the real inputs — not cost optimization.
The P3 process is a year-long commitment, not a bid
Alongside the Cape Breton Hospital, Pomerleau is the design-builder on two P3 long-term care facilities in Gander and Grand Falls-Windsor, Newfoundland — 60-bed, three-storey buildings developed by infrastructure investor Fengate under a DBFM contract. These were the first P3 projects in Atlantic Canada when financial close was reached in June 2019.
Robar describes the process plainly: from RFQ through RFP through financial close, "it's a year-long process start to finish easy." That is not a complaint about procurement bureaucracy; it is a staffing and resource-planning fact. The estimating team, the design team, the equity partner, the financial advisors — all of them are running at close to full commitment for twelve months before you know whether you have the project. If your P3 pursuit strategy does not account for that cost and resource load, you are bidding on the hope that the work is free. It is not.
Newfoundland's market has largely moved toward design-build and P3 delivery, while New Brunswick runs on lump sum, PEI on lump sum, and Nova Scotia on construction management — four provinces, four different procurement regimes. "Newfoundland is in a db p3 kind of market... New Brunswick is lump sum... Nova Scotia here is CM," Robar says. A GC that can only operate in one mode cannot cover the region. Pomerleau manages this by staying genuinely adaptable across all four, which is easier said than structured.
BIM is not a deliverable — it is a conflict-resolution engine
Ashwin Rajendran moved from Calgary to Atlantic Canada during the pandemic — 14-day quarantine, bought a house sight unseen — and now runs a portfolio that includes wastewater treatment plants in Wolfville, Wabush, and Prince Edward Island, as well as hospital work in New Brunswick. He is Pomerleau's clearest voice on the technology stack, and he makes a precise case for where BIM actually earns its keep.
On an Alberta live-station project, the team ran 3D clash detection through the building model before mobilization. "before we even had the first bucket in the ground we identified... probably two dozen issues," Rajendran says. Drawing conflicts — mechanical vs. structural, plumbing vs. electrical — that would have required expensive field rework if discovered mid-build were resolved at the coordination table instead. The cost to fix a conflict in a drawing is a fraction of the cost to fix it in concrete.
Pomerleau adopted BIM in 2012 and has since added robotic total stations, drone and laser scanning, and Holobuilder — a system that places QR codes on site and links them to 360-degree photo walkthroughs. Senior staff and owners can check in remotely: "we can log in and just see what happened last week what happened this week in a 360 view." The value is less about the technology than about what the technology replaces: disruptive site visits, slow information flow, and the lag between when something happens on a building and when the people responsible for it find out.
But Rajendran is clear about what technology alone does not do. "it's not just having the technology but also having the knowledge and everybody understanding what we have" — the investment in training site teams to use the tools correctly is at least as important as the tools themselves. A drone on a shelf is not a scanning program.
Culture at scale is a system, not a vibe
Emily Surette's background is in manufacturing HR, and she joined Pomerleau specifically because of its family-owned values. The evidence she points to is concrete rather than aspirational.
Every new hire at Pomerleau — regardless of region — is brought to PX Cube, a dedicated cultural onboarding facility in Quebec, within the first six months. "they'll be flown to PX Cube to meet their peers from across the country... spend about three or four days." The purpose is cross-regional relationship-building: the person you met in Quebec is the one you call when a problem shows up in Atlantic Canada three years later.
The founder connection runs the same way. When Robar's daughter broke her femur, he received a personal call: "just got a call from Francis said hey heard about... let me know if you need anything." Francis Pomerleau is the principal of one of Canada's largest contractors. The fact that he made that call — and that Robar's telling of it carries genuine weight, not performance — is the data point that distinguishes a company that means its culture statements from one that prints them.
Pomerleau also runs a Women in Construction cohort, is in the process of producing its first ESG report, and has engaged external consultants on a DEI program. On ESG, the forward-looking reason is already showing up in procurement: "some clients now are only investing in opportunities sustainable that are." ESG reporting is becoming a bid prerequisite for institutional work, not just a communications exercise.
Winning sectors grow from team passion, not strategy slides
Healthcare, wastewater, and recreation have been Pomerleau's strongest sectors in Atlantic Canada. Robar's explanation for why is worth sitting with: it is not because the firm did a market analysis and targeted those verticals. "our team local in-house team they love working on those projects and they're passionate" — the enthusiasm shows up at bid time, in the quality of the relationships with trade partners, and in the institutional knowledge that makes each subsequent project run better than the last.
The recreation portfolio includes the Marystown YMCA, the Goose Bay Labrador Wellness Centre, the Moncton Athletic Stadium, and the Moncton Intergenerational facility. These are the kinds of community-anchoring projects that Atlantic Canada voters pay attention to, and that clients remember when the next one goes to tender. Winning sector depth is partly strategy, but it is mostly the compounding of teams who are genuinely invested in the work.
The talent crunch is structural, and it is not going away
The episode's closing exchange is its most forward-looking. Robar forecasts more automation, prefabrication, and modular construction — not as aspirational trends but as responses to an aging workforce and the labour constraints the region is already living with. Surette's framing on the talent side is equally direct: "the war on talent is real so we have to get competitive get creative with how we recruit."
Automation displaces some headcount but does not eliminate the need for skilled people — it changes what those people need to know. The firms that will be able to staff the automated and prefabrication-heavy projects of the next decade are the ones building employer brands and retention structures now, when the competition for those workers is still manageable. Waiting for the crunch to intensify before investing in values-led recruitment is the expensive path.
Guests: Lorin Robar, Regional Manager, Atlantic Canada; Ashwin Rajendran, Project Director; and Emily Surette, Talent Business Partner — all at Pomerleau Inc.. Episode 14 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Lindsay Construction — the Cape Breton–based general contractor partnering with Pomerleau on the hospital JV; Fengate Asset Management (developer/sponsor of the Gander and Grand Falls-Windsor P3 long-term care facilities, confirmed financial close June 2019); and Pomerleau's Love is an Essential Service campaign, which raised over $600K during COVID.