The new Île d’Orléans bridge will cost $2.75 billion

Expected for twenty years, the new Île d’Orléans bridge will cost more than 2.75 billion to build. The bill is so high that the Legault government hesitated to move forward. Its delivery is scheduled for summer 2028.

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As is the case for all infrastructure projects, the construction project for the new Île d’Orléans bridge is not immune to overheating.

The difficult economic context, inflation and the technical aspects (with the presence of a seismic fault under the river) of the cable-stayed bridge concept unveiled in 2020, in a fragile ecological environment, have contributed to inflating costs.

Among the three consortia that qualified during a two-stage call for tenders process, it was ultimately Groupe Héritage Île-d’Orléans which won with the lowest bid.

To give an idea, the closest bidder offered to build the same bridge for $700 million more, which would have brought the bill to nearly $3.5 billion.

Tough discussions

This explains why the conclusion of the call for tenders took longer than expected. As our Parliamentary Office reported at the end of March, the date of December 13, 2023 was first circled in the calendar to announce the selected nominator.

The Minister of Transport Geneviève Guilbault and her colleague responsible for the Capitale-Nationale, Jonatan Julien, will finally make the announcement Tuesday morning, at 10:30 a.m., on Île d’Orléans.

According to our information, the file for the new Île d’Orléans bridge has been the subject of serious discussions within the Legault government in recent weeks, due to the costs. At precisely $2.759 billion, it is more than for the bridge on the island of Île-aux-Tourtes (2 km), in the metropolis, the bill for which recently climbed to $2.3 billion, or nearly a billion more than expected.

But the islanders of Félix Leclerc’s island have been waiting a long time for their current old bridge dating from 1935 to be replaced by new infrastructure.

• Listen to the Dutrizac – Dumont meeting via QUB :

Its replacement was announced by the Liberals in 2015. It was then supposed to be delivered in… 2024. But once in power, in 2018, the CAQ members discovered that the new bridge could not be delivered before 2027. Its delivery has since been postponed for an additional year. The target, at this time, would still be August 2028, according to a document obtained by The newspaper.

Weight limits, imposed for four years on the current old bridge for safety reasons, are costly for agricultural producers on Île d’Orléans. They will have to endure them for another four years, and it is not excluded that these limits will be extended again by the time the new infrastructure comes into service.

The new bridge on the island is one of the projects covered by the infrastructure acceleration law, adopted in December 2020. The Legault government hoped to inaugurate it a season earlier. But the negotiations underway since November have eliminated this possibility. This is precisely the type of project that Minister Guilbault would like to entrust to a future government transport agency, insists a source familiar with the matter.

Even at this price, those who dream of a 3^e Quebec-Lévis link to the east, possibly connected to the new bridge will be disappointed: the current concept was not imagined to accommodate a flow of such magnitude. CDPQ Infra will also take this into account, we are told.

The new bridge in brief

• Groupe Héritage Île-d’Orléans (Dragados Canada inc. and EBC inc.) won the two-stage call for tenders for its design and construction, with a proposal of $2.759 billion
• With a length of just over 2 kilometers, the new cable-stayed bridge will be built approximately 120 meters west of the current bridge
• It will include one traffic lane per direction, twice as wide as on the old bridge.
• Cyclists will be able to benefit from a multi-purpose path on either side of the traffic lanes
• Preparatory work began on the Île d’Orléans side in August 2022 and will be completed in the summer of 2024, on the Côte du Pont
• After the commissioning of the new infrastructure in August 2028, the current bridge, which will be 90 years old next year and which no longer meets today’s seismic standards, will be demolished by 2033 at the latest.