Strengthening cost certainty for Canada’s federal marine infrastructure

Canada's federal fleets are being built. The jetties, wharves and terminals that will support them are being costed using frameworks that were never designed for marine work. When costs move later, the reasons can often be traced back to assumptions made at this early estimating stage. 

New ships, old estimating habits

Generational fleet renewal is under way across Canada's federal marine estate. Through the National Shipbuilding Strategy, new Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships are already in service, with Joint Support Ships and Canadian Surface Combatants to follow. The Canadian Coast Guard is renewing its own fleet and federal ports are being recapitalised on both coasts and in the Arctic. 

“Each of these programmes has its own mandate, business case and Treasury Board submission.” 

What they share is a dependency that gets far less attention: every vessel needs shore infrastructure that, in many cases, is significantly older than the fleet it will serve. And the cost estimates behind that infrastructure are often built using frameworks designed for a different class of asset altogether. 

This isn't a one-off delivery issue. It's a structural pattern and it's becoming more visible as federal programme outcomes reach the public record. 

How does marine risk differ from land-based risk? 

Ask a senior executive to approve an early estimate for an office building and the method behind that figure is well understood. Cost benchmarks exist. Allowances are calibrated. The range of likely outcomes is familiar, even if uncertainty remains. 

Marine projects don't offer that comfort. Estimates have to account for work with little direct equivalent on land: subsea rock drilling and blasting, dredging and disposal of seabed sediments (often contaminated, sometimes requiring long-distance disposal), engineered residual-risk capping, turbidity and silt control, deep piling through variable seabed conditions and corrosion protection built to last decades. Add bespoke fendering and mooring systems, tight seasonal and environmental work windows and a limited pool of specialist contractors and the picture is clear. 

Marine contractors understand these conditions well. Cost frameworks built for vertical and horizontal construction often don't. When marine-specific risks get folded into generic percentage allowances, estimates under-reserve in predictable ways. A 15 percent contingency on a 500 million dollar marine programme might look sensible on paper. It's rarely enough in practice. Recognising this distinction early, and pricing it as its own risk category, is the first step towards a more reliable number. 

How can estimates stay aligned as fleet requirements evolve? 

A jetty estimate is never just an estimate of a structure. It's an estimate of infrastructure sized to a defined set of vessels. Change the length, displacement, power demand or mooring configuration of a ship and the jetty length, deck loading, fendering, utilities and dredging scope all shift with it, along with the cost. 

This tight coupling creates a governance problem: operational requirements are often still moving when infrastructure cost estimates get locked in. The 2014 audit of the A and B Jetty Recapitalization Project at CFB Esquimalt, published by the Assistant Deputy Minister (Review Services), is a documented example.

The audit found that the project’s Statement of Operational Requirements was inconsistent on whether the new jetties were required to accommodate future Canadian Surface Combatants or merely to take them into consideration – a distinction with significant downstream cost implications. It also noted inconsistency in departmental guidance on allowances and contingency, making divergent risk pricing outcomes possible across similar projects. 

The lesson isn't about the teams involved. It's about sequencing. Estimates should be reconciled against every interdependent fleet and infrastructure programme before they're locked, even if that extends early planning. That reduces the risk of committing to numbers built on assumptions that were never settled in the first place. 

How does independent benchmarking sharpen the numbers? 

Public-sector cost overruns tend to get blamed on construction-phase surprises: unforeseen ground conditions, bad weather, contractor performance. These factors matter, but they rarely explain the full gap between early estimates and final costs on federal marine projects. That gap is usually set years earlier, at the estimating stage. 

“One practical fix is to commission marine benchmarking for large jetty and terminal projects independently, separate from the primary design team.”  

Canada's own reference set of comparable marine projects is small, and early-stage underestimation shows up consistently across jurisdictions. Bringing in outside benchmarks, drawn from a wider international pool, gives estimators a broader and more realistic basis for pricing risk than relying solely on local precedent. 

How should schedule be treated as a cost driver? 

Marine programmes are particularly exposed to delay: seasonal access windows, permitting cycles, Indigenous consultation commitments and a limited pool of specialist contractors all make schedule recovery harder than on most land-based projects. Delay on these programmes converts directly into cost escalation. 

“Estimates built around a single, optimistic delivery schedule tend to get corrected later and at scale.” 

Scenario-based pricing, tested across a realistic range of delivery timelines rather than one best case, produces estimates with more honest uncertainty bounds. It also means fewer downstream adjustments once the schedule inevitably shifts. 

Combined with explicit risk pricing and reconciled requirements, this gives programme leaders four practical levers, price marine risk explicitly, hold off locking estimates until requirements are settled, commission independent benchmarking and treat schedule as a primary cost driver, all of which can be applied within existing governance structures, without waiting for a wider policy overhaul. 

The conversation worth having now 

None of this reflects on the skill or commitment of the people delivering Canada's federal marine infrastructure. It reflects the frameworks they're working within, frameworks built for a different class of asset, and the consistent, documented way that difference plays out once programmes mature. 

The fleets are coming. Vessels are being built on timelines that won't wait for shore infrastructure to catch up. The real question for senior leaders isn't whether every current estimate will hold, experience suggests many won't. It's whether the estimating frameworks producing those numbers are robust enough for the next wave of marine investment. Programme leaders who price marine risk on its own terms, rather than folding it into land-based assumptions, will be the ones who avoid repeating this pattern at greater scale and cost. 

This article builds on an earlier piece authored by Douglas McNeill, originally published in ReNew Canada on August 4, 2026.