Dwaine MacDonald built Trinity Energy Group from three people doing spray foam in Pictou County to 80-plus employees across Atlantic Canada. Karsh Singh immigrated from India in 2014, worked his way up inside Soublière Interiors, and bought the Ottawa-based drywall specialist in 2021 — just before steel prices spiked 120%. This episode is about what happens when two founders who've survived those things decide to go in together.
The meeting that started Soublière-Trinity didn't happen in a boardroom. Joe Cork at Aries Contracting introduced the two sides, and the actual first conversation was a dinner at a Moxie's in Halifax — Karsh showed up in a Hawaiian shirt. Six months of due diligence followed. What came out the other end is a new commercial drywall entity targeting Atlantic Canada, with Trinity's local fleet and workforce on one side, Soublière's Ottawa estimation and supervision infrastructure on the other, and Steve Turnbull running the Atlantic division on the ground.
This is the origin story of that partnership, told in Episode 56 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. It's also three founders talking plainly about growth traps, commodity risk, labour dynamics, and why the companies that figure out integrated delivery are going to win the next decade of commercial work in this region.
Building on a government program — and the risk that comes with it
Trinity's early flywheel ran through Efficiency Nova Scotia. The insulation program became a repeating annual contract that gave the company volume, cash flow, and a reason to keep crews trained and employed. Dwaine describes winning it and holding it: “fast forward until now that same program we've won it every time since and now we do six to seven hundred homes.”
That kind of anchor contract is genuinely valuable — it lets a young company fund its overhead while it learns to bid commercial work. But it also creates a single point of failure. Every time a provincial election came up, there was real uncertainty about whether the program would survive. Dwaine is direct about it: “every time an election came up or something that was being used as a political tool we were scared.”
The lesson isn't to avoid government programs — it's to use them deliberately, build your ops and cash reserves while the volume is predictable, and then push into commercial and institutional work before the political cycle can close the door on you. Diversification isn't a growth strategy here; it's risk mitigation.
Revenue growth is not the same as profit
Steve Turnbull left Cape Breton University on scholarship, worked his way through grocery management, then landed in commercial drywall at the Trail Hospital in 2008. By 2012 he was running crews, and the company he was working for grew fast — 700% in a year. He remembers it without nostalgia: “2012 I think was a 700 percent growth and it's funny how they say you're growing so much but the money not necessarily.”
This is the trap. Revenue growth on a large project slate means more bonding, more WIP, more labour cost running ahead of billing. A shop that grows fast without the back office to match it will find the profit has gone somewhere into the gap between billings and receipts. Growth rate is the wrong metric. Margin, cash conversion, and supervision-to-labour ratios are the right ones.
Karsh walked into a version of the same problem when he bought out Soublière's Ottawa operation in 2021. The timing was brutal: “I bought the business and then metal stud went up 120 and I'm on all the jobs where you can't get any increases.” He survived it by pivoting fast into multi-unit residential after COVID froze Ontario commercial work. Moving quickly into a different revenue stream — even a messier one — beat sitting on lump-sum contracts priced before the commodity spike.
How the joint venture actually works
The Soublière-Trinity structure is built around a division of capability, not just geography. Ottawa headquarters handles pre-construction, estimation, and deploys experienced supervisors into Atlantic projects. Trinity provides what only a company with 17 years on the ground in Atlantic Canada can provide: local logistics, fleet, brand credibility with GCs, and the ability to hire local workers. Steve runs the Atlantic operation day-to-day and controls bidding decisions.
The local-hire model is a cost-parity play, not just a PR stance. Karsh frames it as an operational constraint: “if we come in here we have to get local within six months or within one year that's part of your model.” Flying in Ontario crews to do drywall in Halifax or Dartmouth is economically fine on a large project. It is not fine on a mid-sized one. The companies that build local workforces early win the work that the fly-in model can't price competitively.
Early Atlantic projects include a Dartmouth interior fit-out, work in Wedgewood and New Brunswick, and drywall at the Halifax Airport WestJet facility. The QEII Halifax Infirmary Expansion — a confirmed large-scale project whose main construction phase entered February 2025 under PCL Construction, with stated local subcontractor participation as a project goal — represents the scale of institutional work the region is producing over the next several years.
Integrated delivery: one subcontract for everything inside the envelope
Karsh's longer argument is about how the trades industry prices and delivers work. Right now, a GC writing a drywall and interiors scope gets separate bids for framing, drywall, doors, hardware, windows, spray foam, and fireproofing. Each sub writes a separate contract. Each brings its own supervision. Each has to coordinate with the others. The GC's project manager spends a meaningful part of their day managing the seams between scopes.
Karsh's model collapses that: “you have the GC you get one price where you have to write one subcontract for your doors hardware windows drywall paint fire proofing spray proofing.” One contract, one point of contact, one coordination layer.
The labour math reinforces it. Supervision is expensive — it is often the largest line item on a complex commercial job once direct labour and material are accounted for. When a supervisor with drywall experience can also manage the spray foam scope on the same site, you are not paying two supervision budgets: “if I have a supervisor that can supervise a drywall and when he's caught up can work with the spray foam guy I have guys on site.” The integrated approach turns a cost-centre into a competitive advantage.
The technology argument connects to this. Karsh puts the PDF problem plainly: “95 of the trades are estimating using PDFs and the second they get a job they're like what did I miss.” BIM model data exists on most institutional projects. The contractors who can pull quantity take-offs from that data rather than scaling PDFs are the ones who price accurately, win work, and then build it at the margin they bid. In a region with growing institutional project volume, that gap will compound.
Workforce, immigration, and the culture problem
All three guests return to labour throughout the conversation. The demographic math is straightforward: a wave of experienced trades workers is aging toward retirement, and the apprentice pipeline hasn't filled the gap. The companies in this room are competing for the same small pool of local journeymen.
Karsh has been working on a parallel channel: immigration programs that route skilled newcomers directly into the trades rather than into service industries. The Atlantic Immigration Program exists. What most trades companies don't have is the visible infrastructure to use it. “none of us have HR none of us have a good website we're not making anybody aware of what we can do.” A newcomer arriving in Atlantic Canada with drywall experience from India or the Philippines needs to find a company, apply, and understand what the work looks like. Most trades contractors aren't visible enough for that.
The cultural piece goes alongside this. The panel is direct about a pattern in the trades: workers are treated as interchangeable, not developed. For Karsh, that connects to his own path — he came in as a junior estimator and was given room to grow inside Soublière before he eventually bought it. That arc only happened because someone let it.
Build for the cycle after this one
The last stretch of the conversation is about GC relationships, and Karsh makes a point that applies beyond Atlantic Canada: the current pipeline boom is the time to build the partnerships that survive the slowdown. “I want to build the relationship with you now so when this boom is over we still have this together.” Transactional behaviour in a hot market feels efficient; it costs you when the market cools.
Karsh also names the transition that every founder who wants to scale eventually has to make. For the first years, the founder is the company — every problem routes through them, every site decision is theirs. At some point that becomes a ceiling. “if I go and touch it I can do it but then I'm stopping somebody else from doing it and growing into it.” Delegating isn't giving up control; it's the mechanism by which the business survives the founder.
Trinity Energy Group (trinityenergygroup.ca) is the Atlantic Canada building-envelope and energy-efficiency contractor behind the insulation and commercial fireproofing work that funded Trinity's 17-year growth arc. The Soublière-Trinity Partnership (sconstructors.com) is the joint-venture drywall and interiors entity for Atlantic Canada that this episode announces — framing, gypsum board, and building-envelope scopes on commercial and institutional work, estimation and supervision from Ottawa, local logistics and workforce from Trinity.
Guests: Dwaine MacDonald, Trinity Energy Group; Utkarsh (Karsh) Singh, Soublière Constructors; Steve Turnbull, VP Atlantic, Soublière-Trinity. Episode 56 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Aries Contracting (Ottawa) — the Ottawa specialty contractor whose introduction connected the two companies; EfficiencyOne / Efficiency Nova Scotia — the not-for-profit energy efficiency utility whose insulation program anchored Trinity's early growth. Receipt source for the QEII Halifax Infirmary Expansion: Nova Scotia Government, February 2025.