Leslie Price, a long-time local economic development advocate, inside his truck near the Centennial Bridge in Miramichi, N.B., on Feb. 13.Viktor Pivovarov/The Globe and Mail
The Centennial Bridge that spans New Brunswick’s Miramichi River has been a construction site for years.
The provincial government first announced its plan to rehabilitate the nearly 60-year-old 1.1-kilometre bridge, in the river’s namesake city, in 2012. Commute-grinding construction began in earnest about a decade ago, resulting in partial closings that have slowed traffic and exhausted local residents and people travelling to and from New Brunswick’s northeast, who are left with only one other crossing nearby.
The $195-million project about an hour and a half north of Moncton is already behind schedule. An escalating dispute between the New Brunswick government and an Ontario-based contractor, which is alleging unfair treatment as part of a first-of-its-kind interprovincial trade complaint, threatens to drag it out even longer.
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On Feb. 10, the provincial Department of Transportation and Infrastructure ordered the Ontario-based Julmac Contracting Ltd. to vacate its worksite on the Centennial and two other bridge projects, one just down the river and the other near Fredericton. This came after the company filed a lawsuit and a free-trade complaint alleging the New Brunswick government unfairly discriminates against out-of-province contractors in favour of local companies.
It’s not clear when construction will resume, but a full closing will be necessary soon after it does – leaving residents fearful that life will grind to a halt. “It will impact every aspect of everyone’s life on the river,” Leslie Price, a long-time local economic development advocate, said in an interview in the shadow of the Centennial. This inevitable full closing, he warns, could be both costly and deadly, clogging the city’s streets as people reach the sole remaining bridge for work, family, or even emergency services.
“It’s been a dark cloud hanging over the community, and it seems like Groundhog Day,” said Miramichi Mayor Adam Lordon.
“We get told, ‘This is the year it’s going to start,’ and we start to get ready for those closures, and then it seems like there may be further delays.”
The bridge dispute is the first complaint to reach the country’s internal trade tribunal under the Canadian free-trade agreement, which replaced the Agreement on Internal Trade in 2017.
Just reaching this point is an important step for the tribunal, showing how it could improve business between provinces, says Ryan Manucha, a fellow with the C.D. Howe Institute who wrote the 2022 book Booze, Cigarettes, and Constitutional Dust-Ups: Canada’s Quest for Interprovincial Trade.
“Are we 13 provincial and territorial fiefdoms, or are we one economic union?” Mr. Manucha said in an interview.
“This case is a reminder that the Constitution gives a ton of authority, regulatory and legislative, to the provinces – and that it can be used to regulate in light of local concerns, but also used in a way to prefer local firms.”
The Centennial Bridge is named after its opening year, 1967 and carries about 13,700 vehicles a day when at full capacity.
Julmac started winning bridge-repair contracts in the province in 2021, largely in the Fredericton and Miramichi areas. Its first Centennial Bridge contracts involved replacing concrete along the piers, followed by replacing portions of the surface deck and installing utility ducts.
Julmac filed a lawsuit in 2023, revised last year to seek $29.4-million, alleging the province “favours local contractors” by holding it to a different standard. Local companies, the filing states, can use “cheaper and less onerous construction materials and methods than the tender requires,” allowing them to offer lower bids for bridge contracts. This, Julmac alleges, has cost it “millions of dollars more” than the materials and methods local contractors can use.
The company has also filed a complaint under the Canadian free-trade agreement, asking the Internal Trade Secretariat to force New Brunswick to stop “discriminatory treatment” for non-local contractors and pay a $2-million penalty. The agreement requires procurement projects to have “open, transparent, and non-discriminatory access” for all Canadian suppliers.
This trade dispute makes similar allegations about unfair treatment, alleging that the differential standards for local contracts allow those firms to “begin, and advance, work more quickly, eliminating standby time and reducing overhead.”
“You shouldn’t be treated differently if you’re coming in from out of province,” said Derek Martin, president and chief executive officer of Julmac, which is based in Acton, Ont.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
The Internal Trade Secretariat’s resolution tribunal had given New Brunswick until Monday to file its reasoning for the trade dispute to be quashed. After that, Julmac and the case’s intervenors – including the governments of Ontario, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia – will need to send the tribunal further submissions.
The province served Julmac with notices of default over three of its projects on Jan. 31, raising concerns over subcontractor payments, work schedules, the delivery of project drawings and completion timelines. The contractor disputed each of the default notices in writing, arguing instead that the province had breached its contracts. The province removed Julmac’s workers from its sites on Feb. 10; its logo could still be seen on equipment at the foot of the bridge’s north end days later.
Julmac’s lawyers have said in correspondence with the province’s lawyers that the default notices were a “tactical move” to put pressure on Julmac to drop its litigation and free-trade complaint. On Tuesday, the contractor’s lawyers also filed a motion in provincial court for a preliminary injunction that would enable Julmac to return to the three worksites and continue its contracts.
“The province absolutely denies the allegation that the notices and the removal of work were issued in retaliation for a free trade complaint by Julmac and has requested that Julmac and its lawyers cease making and retract all such false allegations,” said Jacob MacDonald, a communications officer with New Brunswick’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, in an e-mail.
In its free-trade agreement filing, Julmac uses the example of the temporary moulds for concrete structures, which provide structural support while concrete sets and cures on a bridge pier.
Julmac alleges that it had to meet higher pressure ratings, requiring double the plywood and 60 per cent more hardware, to meet the “onerous” standards required of it for bridge projects – compared with “simplistic” mould designs that New Brunswick “routinely” allows from local contractors.
The government’s decisions “involve the exercise of discretionary powers under its contracts,” Julmac’s lawyers write. Though local competitors have the same terms, Julmac alleges New Brunswick “exercises its discretion more favourably for the locally-based contractors.”
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