Decades worth of paint to be stripped off Macdonald Bridge towers
Halifax Harbour Bridges will soon begin the process of removing seven decades of paint from the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge's two towers as part of a two-year project to safeguard its steel infrastructure.
A news release Monday said the work, dubbed Project LifeSpan, will involve stripping the towers bare of accumulated paint to allow for "thorough inspections and any required repairs to ensure their structural integrity for the next 70 years."
The towers will be wrapped in a protective enclosure to prevent paint chips, spray and debris from falling into the harbour or onto the bridge or nearby properties while painters and steelworkers are working, Steve Proctor, a spokesperson for Halifax Harbour Bridges, told CBC News in a telephone interview.
The Dartmouth tower will be finished this year and the Halifax tower is expected to be completed in 2026.
The project will require four weekend closures of the Macdonald Bridge — also known as the Old Bridge — this year for the construction and removal of a platform that will separate the work area from traffic on the bridge deck, the news release said.
Upcoming weekend closures
The first closure will begin Friday, April 25, at 7 p.m. Proctor anticipates the second closure will be in May, depending on how the first proceeds. The other two will likely be in November and December, he said.
Halifax Harbour Bridges says the A. Murray MacKay Bridge will always be open when the Macdonald is closed.
Proctor said other parts of the Macdonald Bridge have had paint previously stripped off, but it will be the first time for the towers since the span opened in 1955.
Given the salt water conditions and years of layering paint in spot touch-ups and small repairs, "there's bound to be moisture underneath there so there definitely will be some corrosion that they're going to have to look after," Proctor said.
The two-year project is valued at about $70 million, 85 people will work on it and 95 per cent of the supplies will be bought in Nova Scotia, Halifax Harbour Bridges said.
Price tag includes both years, paint and repairs
Proctor said the $70 million includes both years of the project, the repairs and the new paint.
He said the project has been in the works for three years.
Liberty Blastech, a Nova Scotia joint venture company, was selected to do the work. Halifax Harbour Bridges notes the company's partners "have extensive experience painting bridges."
"Doing painting removal at 90 metres above sea level requires a certain level of skilled individual, so this company has that skill, has Nova Scotia painters working with them, Nova Scotia supplies, that kind of thing," Proctor said.
Keeping eyes on the road
More than 40,000 cars, small trucks and buses cross the Macdonald Bridge daily.
While the work is being undertaken, Halifax Harbour Bridges is urging people to drive carefully.
"Because while it will be an intriguing situation to see dozens of people climbing up the tower, you have to pay attention to your driving," Proctor said.
MORE TOP STORIES
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Yahoo
Toronto gets $67.2M housing cheque as Ontario housing numbers falter
The Ontario government has awarded Toronto $67.2 million in funding after the city came close to hitting its housing starts target last year — but provincial officials say they'll be handing out fewer such cheques in 2025 as not as many cities are hitting their goals. "You have certain mayors in certain towns and cities that absolutely refuse to build. They aren't building a doghouse," Premier Doug Ford said at a news conference at Toronto City Hall Friday, flanked by Mayor Olivia Chow. "They aren't building a garage, and we all know it. "And then you have great cities, and great mayors like Mayor Chow here that's saying, 'We're going to build, we're going to build as quickly as possible because we need the housing.'" This is the second round of funding from the province's Building Faster Fund, which provides funding to municipalities that hit at least 80 per cent of their provincially designated housing targets. Announced in 2023, it promised to provide $1.2 billion over a three-year period to municipalities that achieve annual targets for new home construction starts. Toronto broke ground on 20,999 new homes last year, the province said in a news release, which works out to be 88 per cent of its 2024 housing target. Though Toronto appears to be on the right track, it's now increasingly unlikely that Ford's government will achieve its stated target of 1.5 million new homes by 2031. The latest Ontario budget forecasts 71,800 housing starts in 2025, followed by 74,800 next year and 82,500 in 2027. WATCH | Fewer homes expected to be built in Ontario this year: There have been 260,000 actual housing starts in the three years since the target was set. So if you add in the projections for 2025 and 2026, the province would only be about one-quarter of the way toward its goal at the end of next year, which is the halfway point of the target timeline. The province distributed only $280 million from the fund in its first year after more than half of Ontario's municipalities failed to hit the housing start targets in 2023. The government hasn't updated its housing start tracker since October 2024. As of that point, nine months through the year, only 11 of 50 municipalities had reached their annual benchmark. When asked by CBC News at Friday's news conference why the provincial government is no longer showing the numbers for what each municipality is building, Housing Minister Rob Flack said that he would "have to get back to you." "Housing starts are down. We know that," Flack said. "There's a crisis, a major crisis in this country. We're going to hand out some nice Building Faster Fund cheques — not as many and not for as much this year as we did last year." Flack went on to say that's why the government introduced Bill 17, which is intended to accelerate permit issuance and streamline zoning rules. It also defers the collection of development charges until occupancy, which the province says will provide greater cash flow flexibility. "We know the numbers are down, but if we don't make the changes like we did in Bill 17, we're never going to hit our targets," Flack said. Speaking at the news conference, Chow said that the provincial funding will help build homes in the city faster. "At the end of the day we have a housing crisis, we need to build, whether through deferring development charges, exempting development charges, building the missing middle," she said. "We need to build, build, build a lot of housing, especially affordable housing."
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Carney and Trump are holding private talks to drop tariffs
Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump are having discussions out of the spotlight to reach a trade deal and lift tariffs. Sources with knowledge of the conversations first confirmed the calls with CBC/Radio-Canada and Industry Minister Mélanie Joly later told reporters that Carney and Trump are talking to each other. A source, who spoke on the condition they not be named, said the two leaders have had a few phone calls in the evenings and exchanged text messages about trade since Carney's visit to the White House last month. There have been no public readouts of the talks between Carney and Trump. Sources said the conversations are aimed at reaching an agreement on the trade war launched by the U.S. against Canada. Carney and Trump have talked openly about a desire to chart a new economic and security deal, but the Canada-U.S. relationship appeared to hit a snag earlier this week when Trump doubled tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. The tariffs, now at 50 per cent, are a further blow to the Canadian industries that are the U.S.'s biggest supplier of the Wednesday, Carney only said "intensive discussions" were ongoing and that his government was readying reprisals if negotiations with the United States failed. Sources told CBC/Radio-Canada they are hoping for some sort of Canada-U.S. trade deal by the time Trump and Carney meet at the G7 summit — just 10 days from now in Alberta. Asked Thursday how close the two sides are to a deal, Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he's not talking about it publicly. Speaking in French, Joly confirmed there have been talks and said it's normal during a trade war to have diplomatic discussions. "We won't negotiate in public," she added in English. "We'll let the prime minister do his work." A White House spokesperson told CBC News that Trump was "directly" involved in talks with Canada, but didn't mention Carney specifically. "Talks with Canada continue about trade, border security and defence matters. Any deal announcements, however, will come from President Trump himself," spokesperson Kush Desai said in a official with the U.S. embassy said "both the president and prime minister, or members of their teams, have publicly acknowledged that there are ongoing conversations. But this is not something that will be negotiated in public." Earlier this week, Trump's envoy to Canada, Ambassador Pete Hoekstra, told a crowd in Toronto the deal "is being settled at the highest levels of the U.S. government with the involvement of the highest elected officials." The direct conversations between Carney and Trump were first reported by the Globe and Mail. Carney, who campaigned on the promise he'd take on Trump, has been under pressure to respond to the president's latest tariff salvo. The Canadian Steel Producers Association called the doubled tariffs a "crushing blow" to the industry and said the move effectively blocks Canadian steel from entering the U.S. market. The association wants to see immediate counter-tariffs on U.S. metals. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who said he's in daily talks with the prime minister, called for retaliation if an agreement can't be reached "in the next few days." "Let's hope they get a deal. But if they don't, let's come out guns ablazing," he told reporters Thursday at Queen's Park.
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Trump's 'big, beautiful' budget bill could cost Canadians billions
A small, obscure section buried in U.S. President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act could cost Canadians and Canadian companies billions of dollars, CBC News has learned. Moreover, it could hand Prime Minister Mark Carney's government yet another political hot potato from south of the border — forcing it to choose between scrapping Canada's digital services tax (DST) or risk the U.S. imposing a new withholding tax on the income Canadians, Canadian companies and pension plans receive from investments in U.S. securities. While it still has steps to go before becoming law, the provision has Canadian experts worried. "This is building a nuclear option into a tax treaty that has lasted for 80 years between Canada and the U.S," said David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "Just like the U.S. is totally willing to blow up the international trade order, they're totally willing to blow up international tax rules." The concern centres on Section 899 of Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill — more than 1,000 pages of proposed legislation that Trump says will make good on his domestic campaign promises, including tax cuts for Americans. The bill passed the House of Representatives on May 22 by one vote and now has to be approved by the Senate. Section 899, entitled Enforcement of Remedies Against Unfair Foreign Taxes, would increase withholding taxes for non-resident individuals and companies from countries that the U.S. believes have imposed discriminatory or unfair taxes. Experts believe Canada is likely to be one of the countries targeted by the measure because of U.S. government criticism of the DST. The tax applies to all large businesses, foreign and domestic, that earn revenues from certain online business models in Canada. Global minimum tax measures adopted by Canada could also put it in the Trump administration's crosshairs. The timeline for the legislation is in flux and Section 899 could still get dropped from the bill or be amended. If, however, Section 899 becomes law, it could hit Canadians in different ways. For example, the U.S. currently imposes a 15 per cent withholding tax on dividends Canadians receive from U.S. companies. Under tax treaties, however, an equivalent tax credit from the Canadian government generally offsets the withholding tax. If the measure becomes law and the Trump administration designates Canada as a country with discriminatory taxes, a new five per cent withholding tax would go into effect. That tax would increase by five percentage points per year to a maximum of 20 per cent. It is not known if Canada would adjust its tax credits to offset such a tax. Max Reed, a cross-border tax lawyer with Polaris Tax Counsel, said the potential impact could be wide ranging. "It's definitely going to be in the billions, maybe tens of billions," he said. Kim Moody, founder of Moodys Private Client and Moodys Tax, agrees. "Billions, absolutely billions, for sure, would be the impact," he said. "If Canada and the United States allows this to take hold, the result will be chaos. Absolute chaos." Experts say it is not clear exactly how the tax would be applied. For example, would the new withholding tax be imposed on top of existing withholding taxes? Would it also apply to securities held within registered accounts such as RRSPs or only to dividends from shares held directly by Canadians?Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne's office declined an interview request from CBC News. "Analysis of the implications of the U.S. tax reform bill is ongoing and we await the final version of the bill," wrote spokeswoman Audrey Milette. The U.S. embassy also declined to comment on Section 899 or how it would work. "We are unable to comment at this time as the legislation is still pending final approval," responded an embassy official. U.S. Internal Revenue Service figures show that in 2022, the U.S. withheld $2.9 billion US in tax on $108.5 billion US worth of income from a variety of U.S. sources for Canadian residents and companies. The IRS said $261.4 million US was withheld from individual Canadian residents while $1.22 billion was withheld from companies and $1.24 billion US under the category of Canadian "withholding rate pools (general)." Of the sources of U.S. income received by Canadians, the IRS said $31 billion US was from dividends — half of which went to Canadian corporations. David Pierce, vice-president of government relations for the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, said the chamber began getting worried messages from Canadian businesses once Trump's tax reform bill passed the House of Representatives. "I think the attention and the awareness of it really grew from what was a small subset of companies, now right across the economy — from financial to pensions to, you name it," Pierce said. "They're all very concerned at what this means for average Canadians in your retirement savings and how this would be applied should, of course, it become law." Pierce said the potential cost of Section 899 far outweighs revenue the Canadian government collects from the DST, a tax his group has opposed from the outset. He said the Canadian government should pause the next DST payment scheduled for June 30 and consider getting rid of the tax in negotiations with the U.S. "The concern is that when the U.S. administration makes allegations of Canada's trade practices, they can cite the DST and that's a talking point that rings true not just for Republicans, but also Democrats, in the United States," said Pierce. "That strengthens their hand. It's not strengthening our hand at the bargaining table." Macdonald says the proposed withholding tax would hit hard. "It would have major impacts on Canadian companies, Canadian investors in the U.S — they'd be downright punitive," said Macdonald. "That would probably end up shutting down Canadian businesses in the U.S. and kicking Canadian investors out of the U.S." And the DST isn't the only Canadian tax the U.S. could consider unfair now, or in the future, said Macdonald. "I think this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of threats against Canadian corporate taxation that attempts to level the playing field between American transnationals and Canadian domestic companies that are paying corporate income taxes," he said. Macdonald said the proposed tax could also hit Canadians who don't have direct investments in U.S. securities. "This isn't only for folks with an RRSP," Macdonald said. "I mean, this could extend to the Canada Pension Plan, which is the major means by which people retire in Canada. They could potentially pay dramatically more." The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board declined to comment.
