Canada

Do we have lower construction workers per capita than the US, UK ect.?

We have more than the USA per capita. The UK has more than both. Of course, if the construction workers in Canada are building nuclear power plants, that doesn't mean much with respect to home construction.

Residential construction figures, while out there, seem a little suspect. BLS suggests around one million Americans work in residential construction (~1/10 of all construction workers). The Canadian Home Builders Association suggests 500,000 Canadians (~1/2 of all construction workers).

Given the situation, and the US backing away from building homes after 2008, that might not be hard to believe on the surface. But what really calls those figures into question is that the US had 1.4 million new housing starts in June. Canada, just shy of 300,000. 2x more workers are able to build 5x more houses?

If the numbers are accurate and meaningful, it seems we're really, really lazy. Canadian construction workers are much, much more likely to belong to a union. Perhaps the old trope about leaning on a broom is true?

Granted, it is hard to tell exactly what those numbers mean. The US figure includes jobs like architect. Presumably the Canadian figure does too, but is not broken down in detail. If, hypothetically speaking, 450,000 of the 500,000 in Canada are architects, then that doesn't leave many boots on the ground. The numbers could be valid, and, at the same time, it is possible that we have comparatively few workers where it counts.

I’m more wondering why we got into this situation in the first place.

There are a lot of factors, but a big one is simply that the millennials – who are a huge generation rivalling the boomers in size – left the nest. If you recall, the colleges and universities had to go on dorm building frenzies in the late 90s/early 2000s just to accommodate them all. Once they left those dorms, they wanted houses. Before that time you could barely give your house away, so we didn't think much about building ahead of time.

And we've never had a sufficient labour force to fully recover from that event. We offer more and more money to attract more workers into the industry, which appears to working as the industry is growing, but then, of course, that drives the cost of housing higher and higher.

The same thing is largely happening around the world, and notably in the US where they went, at one time, overboard with building to try catch up, leading to the infamous housing crash (which lead to them halting new construction almost entirely, soon bringing them back to square one, but anyway...). I guess the question is why were Americans able to build – to the point of excess – while we couldn't?

1. They were quicker to dump money into the system to try and correct it. We were still hesitant to spend on homes even through much of the 2000s. By that point the need was starting to become more and more apparent, but Canadians are much more conservative than our friends to the south when it comes to trying new things. We're approximately now where they were a over decade ago with respect to willingness to spend.
2. Perhaps also, which plays into the same conservatism, because Canadian culture is very much go to university, get a good office job, else you will be considered a compete failure in life. We're the most educated nation in the world, according the OECD, and of those who put time into school they see jobs like construction as being a "waste of their education" and would rather do almost anything else to save face. The kids these days are being taught that the trades are cool, but that wasn't the case not so long ago.