Alberta construction adjudication — the province’s statutory fast track for payment disputes — was used 50 times between April 2025 and March 2026. The United Kingdom, running a near-identical model, recorded 2,264 referrals in its last reported year.

That gap opened in a year when Alberta was the only province in Canada where business insolvencies rose.

What the insolvency data actually says

According to the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, 2025 saw 145,297 insolvency filings under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act nationally, a 1.3 percent increase on 2024. On the business side, every province and territory recorded a decrease — with one exception. Alberta increased 18.6 percent, to 57 business filings.

Two caveats belong here, and they belong up front rather than buried.

First, 57 is a small absolute number, and it covers all sectors, not construction specifically. The percentage is real; on its own it overstates the picture. Second, the OSB’s sector data is national, not provincial: construction recorded 208 filings in the first quarter of 2026, up 15 on the same quarter a year earlier, placing it among the sectors with the largest increases. That figure describes Canada, not Alberta. There is no published cross-tabulation of province by sector at this level of disaggregation, so anyone claiming to know how many Alberta construction firms failed last year is extrapolating.

What survives both caveats is the direction. Alberta moved against the national trend, and Alberta’s CCAA filings — 12 in 2025, down one from 2024 — show the larger restructurings holding steady while the smaller failures increased. It is the same pattern visible in municipal charges across 23 Canadian cities: the pressure lands hardest on the marginal operator, not the large one.

Firms are pricing the risk in. In the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey for the second quarter of 2026, the share of businesses planning or budgeting for a Canadian recession within the next twelve months rose from 9 percent to 17 percent. Investment intentions held up; hiring intentions softened.

Alberta construction adjudication: the tool nobody opens

Since August 2022, the Prompt Payment and Construction Lien Act has given the industry statutory Alberta construction adjudication: a binding, enforceable determination on a payment dispute, delivered in most cases inside 60 days. It is not litigation. It is not eighteen months and a set of legal bills that exceed the amount in dispute. It was built on the premise that in construction, delay in payment is itself the injury.

Here is the usage, from the two nominating authorities’ annual reports released in July 2026.

ARCANA, the ADR Institute of Alberta’s construction adjudication programme, administered 50 payment dispute cases between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026. Forty-four adjudicators were appointed. Six notices were withdrawn, either on jurisdictional grounds or because the issue fell outside the legislative framework. ARCANA reports consistent year-over-year increases in appointments.

ADACC, Alberta Dispute Adjudication for Construction Contracts, published its first annual report covering the same fiscal year. It completed two adjudications in the entire province — one in Calgary, one in the Athabasca–Grande Prairie–Peace River region. Both received a determination within the required timeframe. No case was terminated before determination. No extensions of time were requested or required.

The two notices of adjudication claimed a combined $38,919.46, an average of $19,459.73. In one of the two, the determination required no amount to be paid at all.

For scale: Statistics Canada put Alberta’s investment in non-residential building construction at between $1.00 billion and $1.04 billion per month, seasonally adjusted, through the first half of 2026. That is over twelve billion dollars a year of non-residential building alone, before any residential or engineering work is counted.

The UK comparison, and its limits

The United Kingdom has run statutory construction adjudication since 1998, under the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 — the model from which the Canadian provincial regimes, Alberta’s included, ultimately descend.

In the third report on UK construction adjudication, published by the Centre of Construction Law & Dispute Resolution at King’s College London with the Adjudication Society, adjudicator nominating bodies received 2,264 referrals in the reporting year — the highest level on record, and a 9 percent increase on the year before. Close to 20 percent were handled under a low-value or fast-track procedure.

The comparison has to be handled carefully. The UK construction market is substantially larger than Alberta’s, the reporting periods do not align exactly, and the two jurisdictions count differently. A raw ratio of the two numbers is arithmetic, not a usage rate. Nobody should read “45 times more” as a per-capita or per-dollar finding.

What the comparison does establish is an order of magnitude, and orders of magnitude are usually where the interesting questions live. Two jurisdictions, the same instrument, the same 60-day logic, and behaviour that isn’t in the same category.

What is not being claimed

These two datasets are not causally linked. They describe different populations over different periods with different denominators. No Alberta insolvency was caused by a failure to serve a notice of adjudication, and nothing here supports the claim that heavier use of Alberta construction adjudication would have prevented a single filing.

What links them is behaviour, not causation.

Why it matters: cash, not profitability

Insolvency in construction is rarely a profitability event. It is a cash event. A contractor or subcontractor with a healthy order book and positive margins fails while waiting for money it is already owed, because payroll and suppliers do not wait for a payment certificate. That is a different problem from construction cost escalation in Canada, and it does not respond to the same fixes.

Statutory adjudication is the instrument built for that specific failure mode. In the one year Alberta was the only province where business risk rose, the province opened it 50 times.

The detail that should interest anyone who subcontracts is the size of the claims. The average ADACC claim was under $20,000. Where Alberta construction adjudication is being used, it is being used for small money — the kind of dispute that is annoying rather than existential. It is not being reached for at the scale where it would change an outcome.

The upstream point

The UK research offers a clue as to why that matters, and it is not the clue most people expect. The leading causes of adjudicated disputes in the UK are not fraud or bad faith. They are inadequate contract administration and a lack of competence among project participants.

That reframes the whole problem. If most payment disputes originate in how contracts are administered — how variations are instructed and recorded, how progress is certified, how notice provisions are actually operated on site — then the dispute is a symptom appearing at the end of a process that failed much earlier.

Adjudication is a good remedy. But a remedy used correctly is still evidence that prevention didn’t happen. The number worth improving isn’t how many Alberta construction adjudication cases the province runs. It’s how many payment positions are clear enough that nobody needs one.

Why Alberta construction adjudication stays unused

Whether the instrument works is not really in doubt. Two determinations, both delivered inside the statutory deadline, none terminated early, no extensions requested. On the evidence available, it does what it says.

The question is why an industry under measurable cash pressure will not open it.

There are two plausible answers, and they call for different responses. The first is that the framework is simply not well enough known — a problem of awareness, solvable with education and time, and one the Alberta Construction Association has been working on. The second is more uncomfortable: that filing against a client you still want to work for is a commercial decision before it is a legal one, and that in a market where relationships determine the next tender, most firms would rather absorb the loss than be known as the party that adjudicated.

If the second explanation is the dominant one, no amount of legislative refinement will move the numbers. The law is not the constraint. The constraint is that the cost of using it is priced in reputation rather than in dollars — and that is a cost no statute can legislate away. For a market growing as fast as where Calgary’s growth is actually landing, that is a structural weakness worth naming now rather than after the next downturn.

Sources

• Alberta Construction Association, ARCANA Alberta and ADACC Release Annual Reports, 22 July 2026 — albertaconstruction.org
• ADR Institute of Alberta, ARCANA Construction Prompt Payment Adjudication — adralberta.com
• Centre of Construction Law & Dispute Resolution, King’s College London, with the Adjudication Society, third report on UK construction adjudication — kcl.ac.uk
• Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, Insolvency Statistics in Canada — 2025 — ised-isde.canada.ca
• Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, Insolvency Statistics in Canada — First Quarter of 2026 — ised-isde.canada.ca
• Bank of Canada, Business Outlook Survey — Second Quarter of 2026 — bankofcanada.ca
• Statistics Canada, Investment in building construction, monthly releases, first half 2026 — statcan.gc.ca
• Government of Alberta, Prompt payment rules for the construction industry — alberta.ca

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