Through Future Ready® , WSP brings clarity and vision to our projects across Canada and around the world:

The End of Our Journey?

We have completed the drive across the country, from Newfoundland and British Columbia. But there is still so much innovative work we could explore. If we had an infinite amount of time available, we’d take this journey north through B.C. and into the territories to explore:

• The Wood Design and Innovation Centre in Prince George, B.C.
• The Meikle Wind Project near Chetwynd, B.C. (the province’s largest wind farm)
• The Faro Mine rehabilitation project in the Yukon
• The permafrost degradation studies performed at the airport in Inuvik
• Our efforts to improve the quality of the water system in Iqaluit

But alas, it’s time to head home. We hope you enjoyed your journey with us as we look at some of the innovative work our team members have accomplished here at WSP.

Entering the West

We cross the border into Manitoba and into Winnipeg, where we stop to admire the Canadian Human Rights Museum. This colossal architectural gem is found on the northeast corner of The Forks.

After walking around the museum while our car charges, we head north along Highway 6 for a closer look at the progress made on the Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin Outlet Channel Project. Remember the massive floods in 2011 and 2014? Our team is designing emergency outlet channels for both bodies of water that will help distribute the high water levels to prevent more severe floods in the future. As part of the environmental services team, we’re working with project partners to ensure that the local ecosystem is protected in the development of the outlet channels.

From Manitoba we move west into Saskatchewan and take a trip down the Regina Bypass. The Bypass is the largest infrastructure project, by project value, in the province’s history, this complex transportation project used innovative practices for project and construction management to minimize the impact on the commute of local residents, such as the inclusion of multiple grade-separated interchanges, including the second use in Canada of a diverging diamond interchange.

As we continue to work our way west, we veer to the north, first paying a visit to Edmonton for a look at another Enerkem property, their waste-to-biofuel facility in the city’s northeast. We then head south to pass by the Kaye Edmonton Clinic at the University of Alberta, where our mechanical and electrical engineering services, combined with an innovative interior design, helped the building achieve LEED Silver status. We hop on to the Anthony Henday Parkway and heads south on Highway 2 towards Calgary, where we swing by the airport for a quick look at how the CarbonCure concrete pavement is performing at the East Deicing Apron, a concrete that uses infused CO₂ in the pavement to reduce its carbon footprint.

Before heading west, we make sure to drive by The Bow, Calgary’s first steel skyscraper, and the George C. King Bridge, which used innovative practices in prestressed concrete and structural steel to create an award-winning pedestrian bridge for the community to enjoy.

Making our way towards the British Columbia border, we can’t help but take a quick stop in Banff for a closer look at the Bear Street Redevelopment project. Creating a shared space that vehicles and pedestrians could both easily navigate, even during inclement weather, was at the heart of the re-design of this street. Working with our partners to introduce an innovative underground soil cell system helps precipitation quickly move below ground and into the nearby Bow River, helping the people on the roadway above continue to enjoy everything that Bear Street has to offer.

We cross into B.C. and make our way through Kicking Horse Canyon, where our teams have been integral in helping deliver this complex expansion of a key section of the Trans-Canada Highway. We make our way to Vancouver along the iconic Sea-to-Sky Highway (B.C.’s first P3 project), where significant safety improvements were needed as part of the modernization of the roadway ahead of the 2010 Olympics.

In Vancouver, we drive by the Centerm Expansion Project, which will increase container handling at the Centerm Terminal by two-thirds, even though just 15 per cent of additional physical footprint is being added. The new space, along with a re-arrangement of the services on location, will allow for the significant added capacity of 600,000 20-foot equivalent unit containers (TEUs).

While we’re along the water, let’s check out the North Shore Pumping Station (NSPS), being constructed under the Lions Gate Bridge. New infrastructure in the Greater Vancouver Area needs to be able to withstand ‘The Big One’, the major earthquake seismologists predict will someday hit along the fault lines in the region. Using the most innovative approaches available, we can develop structures like the NSPS to continue to function when an earthquake hits.

On Route to Ontario

From Montreal it’s off to the nation’s capital, where our team is involved in the most high-profile restoration projects in Canadian history: Parliament Hill. Along with our CENTRUS partners, we’re helping to design a modern update to the Centre Block with up-to-date technology resources, resilience and sustainability measures, and all the while preserving the delicate architectural history of one of Canada’s most iconic buildings.

While in the area, we’ll want to check out the Energy Services Acquisition Program’s Energy Systems Modernization, a district energy project that’s helping the federal government meet its own low-carbon goals. We’ll also want to take a walk along the award-winning Flora Footbridge across the Rideau Canal while enjoying a Beavertail or some other form of local cuisine.

On our way out of the city, we’ll take a quick trip to see our team working on the Confederation Line East extension of the Ottawa LRT, and check out the Pinecrest Bridge, where the use of the air pad system for a lateral slide bridge replacement, the first application of its kind in North America, won WSP, our EWC Designers Joint Venture project partners and Design-Builder KEV a Transportation Innovation Award from the Ontario Road Builders’ Association.

We travel down Ontario’s Highway 401 to land in Canada’s largest economic centre: Toronto. Our teams are busy in the downtown area, supporting the largest regional transit project in Canadian history, the GO Expansion – On-Corridor Works, and Canada’s largest Alliance contract, the Union Station Enhancement Project. Both projects will help to expand and electrify the GO network, providing a low-carbon transportation for millions of residents.

A short drive southeast of Union Station takes us down to the Port Lands, where the WSP team has been hard at work helping to deliver a robust Master Stormwater Management Strategy along with environmental surveillance systems, which monitor things like air quality, water levels, noise, and vibration, that have been utilized throughout the ambitious development of the massive waterfront property. Our active transportation team has also played a key role in the redevelopment project, introducing a transportation system for the area that takes a pedestrian-first approach to people movement including wide sidewalks, cycle tracks, streetscaping and green infrastructure elements.

 It’s a long drive into Northern Ontario before we reach the towers of the Wataynikaneyap Transmission Project, the 1,800-kilometre line that is connecting 17 remote First Nations communities to the electricity grid, eliminating diesel-power generation in those communities. Majority owner Wataynikaneyap Power is a partnership of 24 First Nations, who came together to drive the clean energy project forward.

Crossing into Quebec

We make it across the border and head towards Riviere-de-Loup before diving southwest down A20 towards Quebec City. We stop to charge our car and take a quick boat ride for some whale watching in the St. Lawrence River. To minimize the impact of shipping routes on this vital mammal population, we’re working with the Canadian Space Agency to monitor the movements of the North American Right Whale to plan better shipping routes that minimizes the impact on this vital mammal population.

After a quick stop in the provincial capital, we make our way south to Lac-Megantic, home to Quebec’s first microgrid. Our team advised officials from Hydro-Quebec on how to integrate existing Smart-City technology with modern renewable resources to provide clean power to 30 inter-connected buildings.

As we drive west towards Montreal, we stop in Sherbrooke to visit WSP’s innovation lab. Our team of scientists and researchers develop innovative new technologies to solve issues that arise from client challenges. If there’s not a technology accurate or flexible enough to be used in a wide range of environments, our Sherbrooke lab develops new technology that help solve today’s toughest engineering challenges, such as tomography to count fish, radar to detect birds and bats that are further away, and mobile units to continuously treat water and soil to name a few.

Before driving into Montreal, we veer into Varennes to check out the progress on Enerkem’s new biofuel plant, which will transform non-recyclable waste into value-added biofuels and renewable chemicals.

 We head back towards Montreal and cross the Champlain Bridge, the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world. Using stainless steel and high-performance concrete, this bridge is built to last nearly twice as long as standard highway bridges. We travel along the highway to the Turcot Interchange, one of Canada’s most complex transportation interchanges. This massive interchange was completely rebuilt with minimal impact on the estimated 300,000 vehicles per day that access the roadway, or the CN rail corridor that passes through it, thanks to the utilization of a state-of-the-art 3D visualization tool.

Welcome to Atlantic Canada

Our journey begins in the quiet community of Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Here, our team is developing the new Acute Care Hospital, which will be the beacon of health care service in western Newfoundland. The facility will use a people-centric design for an open, welcoming atmosphere, and on-site geothermal heating and cooling to minimize carbon footprint.

With a few stops to charge the car and the avoidance of the odd moose crossing the Trans-Canada Highway, we hop on the ferry on route for Nova Scotia. Arriving in North Sydney, we make our way across to the Cabot Trail and down to the Canso Causeway to arrive on the mainland of Nova Scotia.

We drive across Highway 104 toward Truro, from Sutherlands River to Antigonish, a 38-kilometre stretch in the midst of a significant upgrade to provide safer travel for area residents, who had petitioned the province to upgrade the roadway following a series of fatal collisions. Doing so has meant installing significant environmental considerations that protect the region’s animal populations, including wildlife corridors and new culverts that protect fish-bearing waterways.

As we work our way west, we take a trip over the Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island to see how Canada’s national parks are being protected from wave erosion well into the future, by modelling expected future wave patterns and designing erosion control measures. And you can’t visit the island without checking Cavendish Beach, where we’ve designed walkways over sand dunes so you can fully enjoy the beach’s beauty – but the sand dunes are expected to move over time. To keep the walkways Future Ready® (out of the dunes) for the next 20+ years, we modelled future wind patterns to predict how the dunes would shift.

After a brief stop for some fish and chips it’s back over the Confederation Bridge to continue our journey westward. All Parks Canada assets are preserved and invested in using innovative approaches we’ve supported Parks Canada in developing. To get a closer look, we drive south to the Bay of Fundy Conservation Area, where we also stop to learn about Canada’s blue carbon resources, including the Bay’s salt marshes, which are valuable coastal areas that we are working to protect from development to continue our ongoing commitment to a low-carbon Canada. New Brunswick also boasts the longest covered bridge in the world, in Hartland. To preserve our heritage, our team has worked out a system to value and maintain all our covered bridges, which are world-class attractions.

As we head north, we divert over to Route 144, a vital transportation that was rendered unpassable after a culvert collapsed. Thanks to an innovative approach for culvert and slope stabilization, the emergency solution allowed for the roadway to be closed to motorists for a very short amount of time. This new solution will help divert waters during future flood events and keep this link operational.