October 2, 2026 - Maintenance Industry
Rethinking Contracting in a Changing Industrial Environment
On October 2, 2026, AMCC President Shandra Linder opened the session Beyond the Bid: Contracting 2.0 in an Era of Supply Chain Uncertainty at Supply Chain Canada West's FUTURES Conference in Edmonton.
Her remarks connected the discussion to work AMCC began more than a year ago through One Industry. One Workforce. One Future., reinforcing why traditional approaches to contracting and workforce planning must evolve alongside Canada's changing industrial environment.
From earlier engagement and better information-sharing to more collaborative contracting models, Shandra outlined why owners, contractors, labour and government must work differently together to protect Canada's industrial capacity and ensure critical work continues to get done.
Read Shandra's opening remarks below.
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Shandra Linder President,
Association of Maintenance Contractors of Canada
Supply Chain Canada FUTURES Conference
October 2, 2026 | River Cree, Edmonton
Good morning everyone,
Thank you to Supply Chain Canada West for having us here today and for creating the opportunity to have this conversation.
I'm Shandra Linder, President of the Association of Maintenance Contractors of Canada, or AMCC.
For those who may be less familiar with us, the AMCC represents the work behind reliable industry.
Maintenance contractors are essential to Canada's industrial economy. They keep plants operating smoothly, crews productive and production steady. From planning and scheduling to workforce dispatch, safety supervision and technical work, they manage the operational realities that can determine whether a turnaround or major maintenance event succeeds or fails, and whether systems continue to operate efficiently.
Across energy, manufacturing and major industrial facilities, maintenance work safeguards billions of dollars in assets while helping ensure safe and efficient production continues.
AMCC exists to support this work. We bring together contractors, labour partners, owners and industry leaders to strengthen how maintenance is planned, staffed and delivered. Through research, labour relations leadership, training and industry collaboration, we work to reduce friction between stakeholders and strengthen the systems that support safe, reliable facilities.
The result is greater workforce stability, safer worksites and more predictable outcomes for Canada's critical infrastructure.
In industrial maintenance, success is often measured by what does not happen.
Facilities stay online. Turnarounds are completed safely. Projects remain on schedule. Production continues uninterrupted.
When everything goes well, much of the work behind that success is almost invisible.
But those of us in this room know what it takes to make that happen.
Behind every successful shutdown, turnaround, outage or maintenance event is an enormous amount of coordination involving owners, contractors, skilled tradespeople, educators, labour organizations, government and supply chain partners.
No organization can accomplish this work alone.
That reality is why collaboration has become one of the most important strategic priorities facing Canada's industrial maintenance sector.
The environment is changing.
Across Canada, major projects are accelerating. We are seeing LNG development in British Columbia, energy and petrochemical investment in Alberta, nuclear refurbishment and new builds in Ontario, and infrastructure expansion from coast to coast.
At the same time, new opportunities are emerging across defence infrastructure and increased national defence spending, pipeline and energy infrastructure, critical minerals and mining, nuclear energy, and advanced manufacturing.
Together, those investments are creating unprecedented competition for skilled workers.
But it is not simply the amount of competition that is changing. The nature of that competition is changing too.
New capital entering sectors such as data centres is competing on margin and speed in ways that can put additional pressure on the traditional industrial workforce. At the same time, workers are making different choices about where they want to work. Proximity to home, predictability and lifestyle are playing a greater role in those decisions than they did a decade ago.
So workforce availability is increasingly about more than how many skilled workers are in the market. It is also about where they are, where they are willing to go and what kinds of opportunities they are choosing.
BuildForce Canada's forecasts reinforce the scale of the challenge. Current projections point to a national workforce shortfall of more than 30,000 workers by 2035, with Alberta representing roughly half of that gap.
That means tens of thousands of additional workers will need to enter the workforce at the same time that more projects and more sectors are competing for them.
And there is another part of the equation that can be easy to overlook.
While major projects compete for skilled workers, existing industrial facilities still require the maintenance work that keeps Canada's economy running every day.
The challenge is no longer simply finding workers.
It is ensuring the right workers are available in the right places at the right times, while maintaining safety, productivity and reliability.
Meeting that challenge requires better partnerships.
This year, BuildForce invited AMCC to contribute to its fall newsletter. That work gave us an opportunity to step back and look at what we have been hearing across the industry, and at how the workforce conversation has evolved over the past year.
Collaboration has always been at the centre of AMCC's mandate. Our members operate in an environment where owners, contractors and labour organizations must work together to solve problems that no one party can address independently.
That philosophy was reflected in AMCC's 2025 discussion paper, One Industry. One Workforce. One Future.
To develop the paper, AMCC convened an independent Advisory Panel representing owners, contractors, unions, regulators, educators and industry organizations, including BuildForce Canada and Supply Chain Canada.
I also want to recognize Allan To, who was a member of that Advisory Panel and brought an important supply chain perspective to the work. Allan, thank you for your contribution and for your continued support of the conversation we are advancing today.
Over the course of a year, the panel examined leading maintenance practices, reviewed international examples and challenged long-held assumptions about how Canada's maintenance sector works together.
One of the conclusions was remarkably simple ... many of the industry's greatest challenges are not technical problems. They are coordination problems.
Workforce shortages, labour mobility, productivity, contracting practices and technology adoption ... these all improve when organizations stop working in isolation and begin working as a system.
For AMCC, that discussion paper was never intended to be the finish line. It was the beginning of a longer conversation.
That conversation continued at our AGM in Edmonton this past June, where members and industry leaders gathered with government representatives and educators to discuss the future of workforce development in Alberta and beyond.
One of the most significant discussions centred on the relationship between workforce planning and education.
A panel with Alberta's Deputy Minister of Advanced Education, NAIT's Vice President Academic, and industry owners from Cenovus and Shell examined how training systems must evolve to keep pace with changing needs and labour shortages.
What came through clearly was that curriculum development is only part of the solution. Ongoing dialogue, real-time information sharing and a stronger connection between those delivering training and those employing skilled tradespeople are also critical.
Maintenance contractors have a unique perspective on workforce requirements because they work across multiple owners, projects and trades every day. They are often among the first to see labour pressures emerging, where shortages are developing and where future demand is headed.
That thinking is informing work on a new AMCC initiative, the Workforce Warning Signals report.
In this report, we’re asking questions like how industry can get better at recognizing and sharing the signals that appear before labour pressures become shortages, and before those shortages impact project planning and execution.
Better labour-demand information has value across the maintenance ecosystem.
This is the value of moving from reactive workforce planning to proactive workforce intelligence.
No single organization has the complete workforce picture. Contractors understand when project schedules begin to overlap. Owners understand future capital plans. Labour organizations understand workforce availability. Educational institutions understand training capacity.
Bringing those perspectives together earlier can help the industry make better decisions before a workforce shortage becomes workforce crisis.
We will have more to say about this work later this fall. But, for this session, the point is that better visibility and earlier information-sharing matter because the operating environment is changing, and decisions about workforce, planning and execution are increasingly connected.
And that brings us directly to the conversation we are having here today.
Supply chain uncertainty is not only about materials, equipment and logistics. Workforce availability is also one of the risks shaping whether maintenance and turnaround work can be executed with certainty.
If the operating environment has changed, it is reasonable to ask whether the way we plan, procure and contract maintenance work also needs to evolve.
Those are exactly the questions this panel is designed to explore.
Our session is:
Beyond the Bid: Contracting 2.0 in an Era of Supply Chain Uncertainty.
The panel will look at how early engagement, open-book commercial models, performance-aligned incentives and more effective risk sharing can help owners and contractors respond to labour scarcity, compressed execution windows and heightened risk across materials, logistics and workforce availability.
We will move the conversation from the system level down to the project and contract level.
It’s important that we don’t just talk about this critical work here today. These are the conversations that need to continue until we find solutions. And I’m pleased to let you know that the AMCC will continue this work at our Symposium in Calgary on November 30.
The Symposium will bring together leaders from industry, government, labour and education to continue examining the pressures facing Canada's industrial maintenance sector and the opportunities for stronger coordination.
We are particularly looking forward to hearing from our Keynote speaker Gary Mar, President and CEO of the Canada West Foundation, who will share his perspective on the economic and industrial forces shaping Alberta and Canada.
We will also host a panel featuring:
The discussion will be moderated by Scott Dippel, a longtime CBC Calgary political and municipal affairs reporter, and will explore what the changes underway mean for workforce readiness, competitiveness and the future of industrial maintenance.
But for today, we have an excellent group of people here to take one important part of that conversation further.
Please welcome:
And guiding the conversation is Allan To.
We have deliberately brought together different sides of the relationship because that is the point. No one participant has the complete picture. Together, we have a much better one.
The world around us is shifting. The work cannot stop.
So the question is how we work differently, together, to make sure it does not.
Allan, I will turn it over to you.