The provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia will apply for federal funding to help pay for the protection of the Chignecto Isthmus, but they will also pursue court direction on whether or not the federal government should indeed be covering the entire cost of the project.
Premier Blaine Higgs shared the news in a conference Tuesday, along with a number of federal ministers and Atlantic premiers, marking the renewal of the federal-provincial Atlantic Growth Strategy.
“Yes, we will be applying for it to meet the deadlines that have been put forward,” Higgs told reporters. “At the same time, we will be seeking clarification and legal interpretation of the constitution.”
Higgs said that given the deadline of July 19 for the current round of the federal Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund, “it would be prudent for us to go both avenues, one notwithstanding the other.”
Premier Tim Houston told reporters he would be seeking an opinion on the matter from provincial appeals court.
The cost estimate for the project has ballooned since the long awaited release of a 2019 engineering study on the project, according to comments Tuesday from Higgs and Houston. What was once estimated to cost between $190 million and $300 million is now expected to cost about $700 million, according to Houston. That means a federal contribution could run as high as $350 million, and the provinces could each be responsible for $175 million in costs.
“We understand that there have been cost escalations since the initial engineering study,” said Infrastructure minister Dominic LeBlanc on Tuesday. A 50% federal contribution could eat up more than one third of the national Disaster Mitigation and Adaptation Fund, which LeBlanc said totals one billion dollars.
The minister said he expects, “a number of billions of dollars of projects submitted from across the country,” all vying for the same federal dollars. “But I’ve said consistently, and I’ll repeat it again: This is for us a priority project, for the reasons that Premier Houston and Premier Higgs have shared.”
“Its importance to the economy of the region, its importance in terms of trade corridor, its importance in terms of protecting the municipal infrastructure that might theoretically fail in the case of an extreme weather event and you’d have a contamination of the Bay of Fundy… All of these are a series of very important reasons why we think this is a good project,” said LeBlanc.
Premier Higgs admitted he has not seen the three options currently outlined by engineers in a study commissioned in 2019, and released to the public in 2022. He also did not narrow down which province would take on responsibility for managing the mega project, and making decisions on what type of structures are built. “We have engineers from both the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia working on this,” he said. “I would say jointly, we’d be able to review those proposals and go from there.”
The transportation corridor along the Chignecto Isthmus is estimated to carry about $35 million in goods each day, including the CN rail line and the Trans Canada highway, which carry freight coming and going from the Port of Halifax and Newfoundland and Labrador.
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