“Infrastructure is the thing we don’t think about until it’s not working.”
Quoting the Mayor of Ottawa, Mark Sutcliffe, Wendy Cukier used a simple line to set the tone for WEKH’s Women Build Canada event in Ottawa. Roads, transit, housing, airports, digital networks — we only notice them when they break. The same, she suggested, has long been true of women entrepreneurs: invisible until the system fails, indispensable when it’s time to fix it.
As founder of the Women Entrepreneurship Knowledge Hub (WEKH) and the Diversity Institute, Cukier has the data to back it up. New research from WEKH shows that women are majority owners of 20% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (and co-owners in 17.2% more) generating more than $90 billion in annual revenues and employing close to one million people.
“Women entrepreneurs are anchoring Canada’s economy,” Cukier reminded the audience, pointing to steady growth in women-led firms despite the shocks of the pandemic and ongoing financing gaps. They are also more likely to focus on innovation, social impact and inclusion — exactly the capabilities Canada needs as it embarks on massive investments in housing, clean growth, transportation and trade.
That’s the backdrop for Women Build Canada: a half-day forum bringing together women entrepreneurs and leaders in “critical sectors” — construction, development, aviation, security and engineering — followed by consultations and advocacy on Budget 2025. The goal: to make sure women-owned SMEs are not treated as a side story or a social program, but as core partners in nation-building projects at home and abroad.
“We’re starting to see a gender lens applied to federal investments,” Cukier noted. “But a lens isn’t enough if we don’t track who actually benefits — and if women-owned firms aren’t at the table when the deals are made.”
From there, moderator Victoria Lennox, CEO of the Women’s Enterprise Organizations of Canada (WEOC), took the stage to lead Panel 1: Critical Sectors and introduce five entrepreneurs who are already reshaping Canada’s infrastructure and often against the odds.
“Quiet women rarely make history, said Lennox as she introduced the five women entrepreneur panelists: Jennifer Cross, Co-Founder, City BuildHers; Director, Regional Development (Eastern Ontario), Shandos Construction, Sherry Larjani, President, Spotlight Development Inc., Teara Fraser, Founder & CEO, Iskwew Air, April Stone, Founder & CEO, Indigenous Stone Corp (APL Protective Services) and Marie St. Gelais, Founder & President, Ashini Consultants Engineering.
Lennox stressed the importance of women being at the table and accountability. “We need the actual measurement, the key performance indicators to make sure that women are participating.” If programs apply a gender lens but don’t track who benefits, “it’s absolutely insufficient.”
Different paths, same fight to “build the table”
“My career has been more of a jungle gym than a ladder,” joked Jennifer Cross, who moved from political science to interior design and then into commercial construction during the pandemic.
Breaking into a sector where “our cities are imagined, funded and built by men” was anything but smooth. “It’s hard to just get the first job,” she noted, describing how site culture shapes hiring and how she discovered that a friendly network doesn’t always translate into business.
After an article in the Ottawa Business Journal drew out women already working in construction, Cross realized there was “a whole culture here, but nobody has shone a light on them.” She co-founded City BuildHers, which connects women across construction, engineering, architecture, planning, development and policy so “all the women at the table” can talk about how and why they shape city-building.
“Our cities are imagined, funded and built by men, so we’re not at the table. How can we expect our cities to reflect our needs, desires and safety when we’re not there? It’s not a checkbox anymore. It’s the voices that matter.”
For Sherry Larjani, the fight began at home. Raised in a culture where “being a doctor or a lawyer, mostly a doctor, is acceptable,” she dutifully enrolled in biology. After failing every course, “I became the master of playing cards,” she said. Her father gave her six months to pursue something else.
She hustled through night school physics and art classes, surprised herself by getting into a combined architecture and civil engineering program and then landed a soul-crushing job as “a CAD monkey.”
A small property investment, a pink hard hat and a lot of grit later, Larjani became a builder and then a developer. The reception on site? “They didn’t think I belonged on a job site,” she recalled. “I was the garbage collector, the one bringing beer and food just to bribe the guys to get stuff done.”
Eventually she pulled together partners to create Toronto’s first all-female development team, delivering the Raya project, which was aptly named after the word for “queen.”
Her current focus is deeply pragmatic: affordable housing at scale. On one 1.4-million-square-foot site, she designed a community with 1,800 units, 24-hour childcare, medical centres and skilled trades training, allocating units for Indigenous and Black communities. She financed it with her own capital, family funds and private investors, then “knocked on every door” looking to the government for support.
“I’m only one person. All of our voices are one voice. There has to be more voices going out there, saying fundamental changes need to happen and that people in positions of authority actually need to listen.”
When Teara Fraser took her first flight in a small plane, she was a 30-year-old single mom with a Grade 10 education, with “no access to money” and no connections in aviation.
“It changed my whole life,” she said. “When I got down from that flight, I said, ‘I want that guy’s job.’” Two weeks and one skydiving trip later, she decided. “I don’t care what it takes. I’m going to fly airplanes.”
Within a year, she had her commercial pilot’s licence. Eventually she became the first Indigenous woman in Canada to start an airline, founding Iskwew Air – iskwew being a Cree word for “woman.” The name, she explained, is an intentional act of reclamation, of womanhood, matriarchal leadership, language and the word itself.
Fraser’s own granddaughter, raised around airplanes, recently told her, “Pam-Pam, only boys can be pilots.”
“That is why this matters,” Fraser said. “I want her to know she belongs everywhere she dreams to be.” Fraser also pushed the audience to think of aviation as infrastructure, not a luxury. “People think about the umbrella drink,” she said. “But this is how goods and services move. It’s a literal lifeline for remote Indigenous communities… Our country cannot thrive simply without a thriving air infrastructure system.”
Canada’s user-pay model, she argued, treats aviation as a revenue source, driving up ticket prices and starving regional operators of the investment they need to recover from the pandemic and serve remote communities.
From Treaty 6 Territory in Alberta, April Stone built Indigenous Stone Corp, a diversified company whose services include a fully certified security division, APL Protective Services.
Stone left a large firm after watching how Indigenous employees were recruited to hit targets and then left without “aftercare.”
“People are not a number,” she emphasized. “Companies say, ‘I have 10% Indigenous content, 15% women. I’ve met the benchmarks,’ and then they drop it. I’m the one on the other side saying, ‘No, you have to continue on.’”
She also spoke bluntly about stereotypes and the double bind for Indigenous women. ‘You’re an Indigenous woman, you should be a social worker, which is what they told my daughter. Everything should be open to everybody.”
Access to capital has been another barrier. Stone worked three jobs to build cash flow because she didn’t want to give up her salary without savings, only to age out of certain programs and see her track record discounted.
In competing for defence and major security contracts, she’s often told she lacks the “longevity” of established, male-owned firms, even when her safety record and experience stack up.
“Women have to stand together. That’s the biggest problem we have,” she said. “And the government has to re-look at how it opens those doors.”
Civil engineer Marie St. Gelais grew up in an Indigenous community on the north shore of the St. Lawrence in Quebec. She first chose engineering because her father told her, simply, to “pick something that will allow you to go outside.”
Over time she realized that engineering is central to community self-determination. “Our communities lack control over the construction of their own infrastructure,” she said.
So she founded Ashini Consultants Engineering, an Indigenous-owned firm named after her great-grandmother, Maria Ashini. Her team designs buildings and community infrastructure with communities, intentionally bringing different voices into the design process and bridging between major projects including pipelines, rail, mining, and the lands and Peoples they affect.
“We need Indigenous technical voices in those projects,” she stressed. “We want to bring traditional knowledge to create better projects and not just for Indigenous communities, but for society.”
Credibility has been a hurdle. “To a lot of people, ‘Indigenous engineering firm’ doesn’t go together,” she said. “I’ve had to build that credibility over years.”
“The federal government talks about opportunities,” she said. “But if we want real opportunities, they have to stop putting the responsibility on first-tier contractors. They need to adapt their own criteria and take the lead.”
Women Building Canada
The final question turned to the federal budget and record-level investments in housing, transportation, climate and other critical infrastructure.
Cross argued that much of the funding will flow through collaborative initiatives such as consortia of architects, engineers and contractors.“If we as women are not at those tables, we’re not going to see that funding,” she said. “Even within our own companies, if we’re not integrated enough, others will grab those projects.”
Larjani called for stronger partnerships between public and private sectors and for governments to match their promises on affordable housing with capital that reflects the true scale of the crisis.
Fraser urged policymakers to treat aviation like roads and hospitals. Treat it as “critical infrastructure” that underpins trade, health care and reconciliation with remote communities.
Stone pressed for procurement reforms that stop defaulting to “old-boys’” firms and recognize the value and safety records of women- and Indigenous-owned security companies.
St. Gelais emphasized that real opportunity requires federal leadership on supplier diversity, not just expectations that primes will “do the right thing.”
Lennox closed by tying these threads back to WEOC and WEKH’s ongoing advocacy:
“We have an opportunity with these critical industries to work together and provide feedback to the government so that tier one contracts, with the majority of expenditures, have clear plans, transparent measures and accountability. Everyone should rise with these major investments in our taxpayer dollars.”
As Cukier, co-chair of WEKH, noted, “women entrepreneurs are central to Canada’s growth strategy. Their footprint is large, their resilience proven, and their potential, if fully supported, is transformative. Canada is investing in the next generation of infrastructure. Ensuring women, especially in under-represented sectors, participate fully is an economic imperative.”
