RC125 JulyAug 2026 - Magazine - Page 42
CLOSING SHOT
A DIGITAL TWIN
FOR CANADA
by Gord Reynolds
VERY INFRASTRUCTURE project that goes sideways shares one feature.
Somewhere upstream, someone decided based on incomplete
information. Not wrong information. Incomplete. A drawing
that did not match the ground. A dataset that could not talk to
the one beside it. A condition that changed faster than anyone’s
records could follow. No announcement, no single catastrophic
moment. Just a gap between what was known and what was true, widening quietly until the 昀椀eld discovered it for us.
I have watched this play out over the 35 years. From the tools to
the boardroom, from utility operations to Infrastructure Ontario, the
pattern does not change. What has changed is the scale of what we are
asking that gap to absorb.
Canada’s infrastructure sector is drowning in data and dying
of thirst. Every ministry, every utility, every municipality runs its
own platform, its own schema, its own version of reality. Financial
systems that do not know what engineering systems know. Asset
records that cannot talk to operational platforms. Field intelligence
that disappears into a silo before anyone upstairs ever sees it. We have
built extraordinary machines for collecting data and almost nothing
for connecting it.
This is not a technology problem. It is a governance and integration
problem wearing a technology costume. And we have been buying
software to solve it for twenty years while the same failures repeat on
schedule. Cost overruns. Schedule delays. Safety incidents. Service
disruptions. None of these trace back to single catastrophic failures.
They trace back to a hundred small misalignments, decisions made
on partial information, dependencies that nobody modelled, con昀氀icts
discovered by excavator because nobody had a better method. The
entire procurement system has quietly absorbed the cost of not
knowing into its baseline assumptions. We have called it normal for so
long we have stopped questioning whether it has to be. It does not.
A digital twin, built right, closes this gap. Not a dashboard. Not a
visualization. A living model of assets, systems, people, conditions,
and interdependencies, continuously updated, spatially grounded,
and shared. When something changes in the 昀椀eld, the model changes.
When a decision is under consideration, you test it against actual
system behaviour before you commit. You build the project before you
build the project. You 昀椀nd the con昀氀ict before it 昀椀nds you.
That same architecture is what makes AI in infrastructure work. AI
built on fragmented, inconsistently structured data produces con昀椀dent
answers to questions nobody asked, grounded in conditions that no
longer exist. A digital twin is the prerequisite, the data foundation that
makes predictive analytics mean something beyond the slide deck.
Organizations that invest in AI without addressing data integration
are not building intelligence. They are building faster confusion.
E
42—RENEW CANADA –JULY/AUGUST 2026
Forty years of global evidence on voluntary data sharing point
in one direction. Every jurisdiction that achieved meaningful crosssector infrastructure coordination, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia,
did it through statutory frameworks that compelled participation.
The UK built NUAR, the world’s 昀椀rst national implementation of
the OGC MUDDI model, because asking utility owners to share data
voluntarily produced the same result it always does: studies about
why coordination remains a persistent challenge. They stopped
debating and legislated. Coordination stopped being optional. The
Netherlands has run a mandatory equivalent since 2008. Australia is
legislating its way there now. Canada is watching.
Canada has contributed to some of the frameworks we now treat
as aspirational. CSA S250. GIS for Ontario. The Digital Twin Ontario
strategy. We built these things and then built the political will to
leave them voluntary. That is not a technical failure. It is a willingness
problem. We do not lack standards, technology, or expertise. What
we lack is the tolerance for the cost of not having them that other
jurisdictions eventually reached.
We are spending at a scale this country has not seen in decades.
Hundreds of billions committed across transit, energy, water, and
trade infrastructure, managed with the same data practices we have
always had. Building a digital twin on incomplete or unveri昀椀ed asset
data is not a twin. It is a sophisticated guess. And guesses do not hold
up when real operating conditions arrive.
The infrastructure we build today will shape this country for a
century. The data architecture embedded in it, or absent from it, will
determine every decision made across that period. The tools exist. The
models are proven. The standards are written. What remains is the
decision to treat data as the infrastructure it is, and the governance
courage to make that decision binding rather than aspirational.
We know what the alternative looks like. The choice is ours.
RENEWCANADA.NET
GETTY IMAGES
Gord Reynolds is the founder of Battersea, a boutique infrastructure
advisory practice and a former industry executive. During his career, he
helped build the legislative architecture behind the Building Transit Faster
Act, the Building Broadband Faster Act, and Ontario’s Digital Twin strategy.
We have built extraordinary machines for collecting
data and almost nothing for connecting it.
