This TSX Pair Will Power Canada’s Nation-Building Push in 2026

Canada’s “nation-building” boom could quietly show up in your portfolio through two engineering leaders with deep project backlogs and long-run demand.

Amy Legate-Wolfe

Amy became interested in investing in 2018 after having her first daughter. After receiving a masters degree in journalism from Western University, she became frustrated that the finance industry remained a confusing place for Canadians like her: new parents, millennials, and other young people who needed to understand their finances. Now, Amy focuses on tech companies and renewable energy for growth opportunities, coupling that with long-term investing strategies and equities. She also provides investors with a daily newsletter, Canada Stock Digest, for daily market updates. Before joining Motley Fool Canada, she wrote for major news organizations including HuffPost, CTVNews.ca, and CBC. When she’s not researching investing strategies, Amy’s time is pretty much monopolized by her two wild daughters, but in what little spare time she has she loves to do yoga, go on walks with her dog, and travel with her husband. Follow Amy on LinkedIn and Canada Stock Digest. Favorite Investment Quote: “October: This is one of the particularly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.” – Mark Twain

Published February 19, 4:40 pm EST

| More on: STNWSP

Key Points

WSP is scaling up with the TRC acquisition and already has a large backlog tied to infrastructure and power needs.
Stantec is benefiting from steady demand and strong margins, with clear targets that highlight an execution-driven growth runway.
Both are quality businesses, but integration and project execution risk means premium valuations can still disappoint.

Canada’s “nation-building” push sounds abstract until you picture what it actually means in 2026: more housing, more transit, more grid capacity, more water infrastructure, and more climate-resilient rebuilding. None of that happens with speeches alone. It happens with permits, design drawings, environmental reviews, project management, and thousands of small decisions that keep mega projects on track. That is why a pair of TSX engineering giants can end up feeling like a quiet proxy for the country’s to-do list.

Engineers walk through a facility. — Source: Getty Images

WSP

WSP Global (TSX:WSP) sits right in the middle of that to-do list. It runs a global engineering and professional services platform that touches transportation, buildings, energy, and environmental work. The simple bull case is that governments and large companies can delay projects, but rarely cancel the long-wave needs. When Canada talks about building again, WSP tends to show up somewhere in the chain.

The biggest piece of recent news is not a flashy product launch, but scale. Recently, WSP agreed to buy U.S.-based TRC Companies for about $3.3 billion in cash, with closing targeted for the first quarter of 2026. The rationale ties directly to power and energy demand, including data centres, and WSP said the deal should lift adjusted earnings per share (EPS) by a low- to mid-single-digit percentage even before synergies.

The numbers back up the “busy and getting busier” vibe. In Q3 2025, the Canadian stock posted revenues of $4.5 billion and net revenues of $3.5 billion, while adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) rose to $700.4 million and backlog hit about $16.4 billion. It also tightened its balance sheet, with its net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA ratio improving to 1.4 times at quarter-end.

STN

Stantec (TSX:STN) plays a similar game with a slightly different feel as a diversified design and consulting firm with deep roots in Canada and a large U.S. presence, and tends to win work in water, transportation, buildings, and energy transition projects. If 2026 brings a wave of “fix it, expand it, harden it” spending, Stantec sits in the stream where that money gets turned into shovel-ready plans.

Its last year of news has leaned on steady demand and margin discipline, not drama. In Q3 2025, Stantec delivered net revenue of $1.7 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $323.4 million, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 19%, which it called an all-time high. It also posted diluted EPS of $1.32 and adjusted EPS of $1.53, and it grew contract backlog to $8.4 billion.

What stands out most for forward-looking investors is how clearly management frames the runway. In its investor materials, Stantec put targets on the table through the end of 2026, including net revenue of $7.5 billion, adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of net revenue of 17% to 18%, and an adjusted diluted EPS three-year CAGR of 15% to 18%. That is not a promise, but it is a useful map of what “execution” should look like if the cycle stays supportive.

Bottom line

So, could this pair be a buy for investors who want exposure to Canada’s nation-building push in 2026? It could, because both Canadian stocks already have what that theme demands: scale, diversified end-markets, and visible work pipelines. WSP’s TRC deal also leans into the power build-out story in a very on-the-nose way. The “could not” case is just as practical: execution risk always lives in project businesses, acquisitions need to integrate cleanly, and premium stocks can disappoint if growth merely turns normal. If you want the theme with less single-quarter anxiety, this is the type of pair that can make sense, as long as you accept that the price can wobble even when the nation-building keeps rolling.