Ellisdon Corporation

EllisDon is a world-leading construction and building services company that completes in excess of $5 billion worth of contracts annually, in every market sector and across the globe. Over the last 69 years, we’ve grown from being a general contractor to a multi-faceted company that can deliver any aspect of a project.

EllisDon began in 1951, when brothers Don and David Ellis Smith broke ground in London, Ontario with a four-person crew and a name built from Don’s first name and David’s middle name. According to the company’s own history page, EllisDon became the first contractor in Canada to own a tower crane in 1956, and in 1968 was the first in the country to computerize its accounting and cost-control systems. A corporate safety strategy followed in 1971, among the first adopted across all job sites in the industry.

The best-known early landmark came in 1989, when the team designed and built the world’s first retractable-roof stadium at Toronto’s SkyDome, now the Rogers Centre. A freestanding R&D department dedicated to building-science innovation followed in 1990, and the in-house Edgebuilder project management software won the Diamond Award of Excellence at the Canadian Information Productivity Awards in 2003 – the same year EllisDon landed its first public-private-partnership contract, for what was then the William Osler Health Centre, now Brampton Civic Hospital.

Ownership has shifted structurally over time. Geoff Smith took over as president and CEO in 1996 and later built the framework for employee ownership; in 2020 EllisDon completed a full transition to being 100 percent employee-owned. Kieran Hawe, a 23-year company veteran who rose from M&E coordinator to chief operating officer, became president and CEO in 2023.

The company now organizes its work into six lines: Capital, Buildings, Industrial, Civil, Services and Technology. It reports more than 10,000 employees worldwide and, as of 2026, 75 years of operation. Head office remains at 1004 Middlegate Road in Mississauga, alongside a global project footprint that includes the 2018 acquisition of Carillion’s Canadian healthcare-services contracts, which made EllisDon the third-largest healthcare services provider in the country at the time.