Montreal’s Contrecœur Terminal expansion as part of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s nation-building projects may ease t

raffic at the port

, but it won’t solve the port’s bigger problem: getting deep-draft modern container ships in and out.

Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of maritime business administration at Texas A&M University, said the St. Lawrence River channel from Quebec City to Montreal isn’t deep enough to handle increasingly large container ships. It’s designed to handle vessels carrying up to 5,000 standard containers, which is much less than the standard Neo-Panamax container ships that can carry as many as 14,000 containers.

That’s a deal-breaker, he said.

“It’s becoming very evident over the last two or three years as the size of the container ship has increased exponentially that Montreal is becoming marginalized,” the specialist in maritime shipping, port operations and supply chains said. “We’re going to lose market share to the American seaboard. It’s going to eventually undermine maritime connectivity of Eastern Canada. That seems to be what’s happening.”

Montreal’s port

finds itself in an unfortunate paradox, Rodrigue said, because although it boasts an excellent location with ideal rail connections to the United States Midwest, it isn’t ice-free in winter and the cost of dredging the channel would be next to impossible due to the enormous cost and resistance from environmental groups.

The Montreal port expansion, among the five infrastructure projects fast-tracked this month by Carney, deals with neither of those challenges.

The estimated $2.3-billion project will allow the port to handle 60 per cent more traffic by creating space for 1.15 million containers, according to the Montreal Port Authority (MPA).

Both the federal and provincial governments have committed $280 million to the project, which includes the construction of a new terminal at the industrial port of Contrecœur, about 36 kilometres northeast of Montreal, as well as a railway yard, among other infrastructure. It was originally announced in 2021 and is expected to be up and running by 2030.

Rodrigue said the project has been talked about for decades and should have been undertaken 30 years ago when it could have been done at a fraction of the cost. Still, he said, it’s needed.

“It’s going to be a good scale size; it’s got the access, room for expansion and you’ll have a very efficient modernized container terminal,” he said.

Halifax, another major Eastern port

, faces a different challenge than Montreal and isn’t positioned to pick up the slack either, Rodrigue said. It is a deep-water port that can serve much larger container ships, but it’s farther away from major markets and doesn’t have the rail infrastructure to get goods to market as efficiently.

“Halifax will require massive investment in railway connectivity, but there’s not enough volume, so you’re caught in this chicken-and-egg type situation,” he said.

Both ports struggled in 2024, according to a Transport Canada report in June.

The Port of Montreal in 2024 experienced a 4.8 per cent decline in container throughput, while Halifax had a drop of 6.8 per cent. These declines reflect broader global supply chain disruptions, particularly along the Red Sea Corridor, according to the report.

In comparison, container volumes increased at major U.S. ports in 2024, reflecting broader improvements in global trade and economic conditions. Key gateways such as the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, Calif., New York-New Jersey and Savannah, Ga., all recorded significant gains after a challenging year in 2023 despite the dockworkers’ strike on the U.S. East Coast and Gulf Coast.

Still, Peter Sand, Xeneta AS’s chief analyst, pointed out that Canadian container imports have grown by 43 per cent since 2019, a growth rate that requires constant port developments.

“While Montreal isn’t exposed to Asian imports at large, and business expansions with a non-Asian focus are not growing at the fastest pace, it’s important to uphold the highest standards for container terminals in order to attract the business and thus also to support the local economy and employment,” he said.

Sand said attracting larger container vessels is always important, but that requires dredging and more icebreaking to ensure ships can reliably access shipping routes.

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In the end, new generations of ultra‑large container ships prefer deeper, well‑equipped ports, which neither Montreal or Halifax can quite offer, Rodrigue said.

“We have two ports on the East Coast that are facing exactly opposite constraints and neither of them are working well in the long term,” he said.

• Email: arankin@postmedia.com