Mass Timber Goes Up at Moncton’s $600-Million Science Centre

Public Services and Procurement Canada now lists the Atlantic Science Enterprise Centre as in full construction on the science wing at 343 Université Avenue in Moncton, New Brunswick. Mass timber installation began in June 2026, 18 months after ministers marked the wing’s official start.

The $600 million campus is still set to open in stages, with staff moving into the science wing in 2028 and the full site running in 2032. That clock is now the live test of Laboratories Canada, the federal plan to replace aging labs by putting several departments on shared campuses.

Laboratories Canada Has an Atlantic Campus in the Ground

ASEC is the first Laboratories Canada project in Atlantic Canada, a point Ottawa repeated when it unveiled new renderings on November 29, 2024. Budget 2018 launched the strategy with $2.8 billion. Budget 2024 added $900 million. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada now puts the program at $3.7 billion through two federal budgets.

Most of that money is still tied up in other hubs. In August 2026 the government was still awarding a large construction contract for the Regulatory and Security Science Main campus in Ottawa, a later Laboratories Canada job aimed at about 275 staff. Moncton is the Atlantic site that has already left the announcement stage.

Diamond Schmitt, the design firm on a $23.6 million contract including taxes, called ASEC one of the largest federal investments in Atlantic Canada since the Confederation Bridge. Public Services and Procurement Canada is the lead department. Pomerleau Inc. holds the construction-management job. PSPC says the build replaces failing 80-year-old lab infrastructure, a span that matches a 1948 college if staff move in 2028.

When contracts were awarded in December 2021, the public completion date was 2030. The current PSPC schedule lands in 2032. The science has not paused for the slip. Gulf Region work is still running in the building that will eventually come down.

Work Continues Inside a Live Fisheries Lab

The site is the Gulf Fisheries Centre, Fisheries and Oceans Canada’s Gulf Region headquarters and one of four federal labs that specialize in the health of aquatic animals. PSPC is putting the new science wing up to the north of that occupied building so research can continue. Only after staff move does the old centre get taken apart.

Pomerleau calls the job a 125-month endeavour from November 2021 to March 2032, including enabling works that ran to September 2024. The contractor’s own notes treat the occupied building as the hard part. Limited ground, city rules, background checks, and a tight Atlantic trades market all sit on top of a lab that has to keep running.

The practical fix is monitoring, not emptying the halls. Pomerleau installed vibration and noise sensors inside existing labs that alert crews when sound or shaking crosses a line. Drones, a live Devisbox time-lapse feed, and shared BIM models are how the construction manager says it is keeping a live science shop and a job site on the same block.

THE BUILD CALENDAR

1. August 2017: Ottawa announces ASEC at the Gulf Fisheries Centre.
2. December 2021: Diamond Schmitt wins design and Pomerleau wins the base construction-management contract.
3. July 2023: Groundbreaking starts site preparation for major work.
4. September 2024: PSPC exercises the construction-management option and major building work begins.
5. November 29, 2024: Ministers mark the official start of science-wing construction and release new renderings.
6. June 2026: Diamond Schmitt says mass timber installation has started.
7. 2028: Science wing is scheduled for occupancy; phase 3 is scheduled to begin.
8. 2032: Full facility is scheduled to be operational.

Phase 1 site work ran from early 2023 through 2024. Phase 2 is the science wing, begun in 2024 and due in 2028. Phase 3, starting in 2028, is the deconstruction of the Gulf Fisheries Centre and the rest of the campus. If that sequence holds, scientists walk into new labs before the old college is stripped.

What $600 Million Buys in Downtown Moncton

The $600 million figure is the federal investment in the whole facility, not a single invoice. Named contracts on the public record are smaller, and they do not yet cover every year of phase 3. Pomerleau, describing its own construction budget rather than Ottawa’s investment line, puts that construction budget at about $400 million.

THE MONEY ON THE MONCTON SITE

Local labour is part of the pitch. PSPC said construction would put upwards of 200 workers on site at peak. Those jobs run for years, not for a ribbon-cutting week, because the old building stays in use until the wing is ready.

Green targets are written into the same file. Diamond Schmitt’s project sets net-zero carbon and LEED Gold targets, plus a net-zero energy aim. PSPC also wants Fitwel healthy-building certification, a whole-building carbon count that includes mass timber, and a plan to keep most construction waste out of landfill. Pomerleau lists a geothermal wellfield, heat pumps, heat recapture, dry coolers, and heat recovery from sanitary water as the mechanical path to those aims.

Four Departments Share One Roof

The November 2024 release said ASEC would house scientists from five science-based departments and agencies. PSPC’s project page names four organizations on site and the Canadian Space Agency as a virtual partner. Both counts describe the same split: four tenants in the building, one joining remotely.

WHO MOVES INTO ASEC

• Fisheries and Oceans Canada: Gulf Region headquarters, aquatic-animal health science, and the national headquarters of Small Craft Harbours, per DFO’s ASEC brief.
• Environment and Climate Change Canada: Science and enforcement staff working on Atlantic freshwater and coastal systems.
• Canadian Food Inspection Agency: Operations staff tied to food and animal-health work that overlaps the same waters.
• National Research Council: Federal research staff listed among the on-site partners on the PSPC project page.
• Canadian Space Agency: Virtual partner, not a floor tenant.

When the campus is complete it is supposed to hold over 700 employees. Peggy Theodore, a principal at Diamond Schmitt, said scientists asked for laboratory neighbourhoods grouped by activity rather than by department. Floors and lab clusters take identity from the Wabanaki clan system, a framework developed with Mi’kmaq Elder Noel Millea so people mix across agency lines instead of staying in old silos.

That is the operational bet hiding under the renderings. ASEC is not five new ministries. It is a forced roommate plan for federal science on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, with offices, shared equipment, a conference hall, and public rooms on a downtown Moncton block.

The College Facade Will Be Taken Apart

The Gulf Fisheries Centre sits in the former Collège Notre-Dame d’Acadie, built in 1948 as the first Francophone post-secondary school for women in the Maritimes and run by the Sisters of Notre-Dame-du-Sacré-Coeur. It closed in 1965 after Université de Moncton opened. Fisheries and Oceans Canada bought the property in 1982 and opened the Gulf Fisheries Centre in 1986. Public Services and Procurement Canada has owned the building since 2001.

Parks Canada lists it as a recognized federal heritage building for that Acadian-education history and for a simple, five-storey limestone facade from the Smith Quarry in Shediac, the same stone used on the local cathedral. The designation is confined to the building’s footprint. Almost none of that mass will survive as a standing structure.

PSPC’s plan is commemoration by salvage. A portion of the front masonry facade will be taken down and rebuilt as the public face of the new campus, with the old main entrance kept as the principal door. Pomerleau says stone from the existing building will be conserved and reinstalled in the same order so the wall reads as the original. Designers also met the Congregation of the Sisters of Notre-Dame du Sacré-Coeur so the college’s history informed rooms, not only the street wall.

That work waits for phase 3. The heritage gesture is real, and it is scheduled after 2028, once staff are in the new wing and the occupied lab can finally go dark.

A Right Whale Hangs in the Plan

The first object visitors are supposed to meet is a 14-metre North Atlantic right whale skeleton in the atrium, one of the centre’s main scientific artifacts. Pomerleau says a specialty firm will hang a skeletal model during phase 2, which means the whale is planned to go in before the 2028 move-in, not as a finishing flourish in 2032. In Mi’kmaq teaching, whales are masters of sea life. The skeleton is also a working reminder of an endangered species the labs are meant to help protect.

This Centre demonstrates our government’s commitment to continuous scientific excellence and innovation and will foster connections between people and information. As such, the future Centre will focus on working to protect and sustain Atlantic freshwater and coastal ecosystems and will strive to engage scientific and academic communities, Indigenous peoples, the fishing industry and the public.

Diane Lebouthillier, Minister of Fisheries, Oceans and the Canadian Coast Guard, November 29, 2024 announcement in Moncton

Indigenous design is not only a wall label. PSPC says Indigenous participation plans on the design and construction-management contracts will send over $60 million through Indigenous businesses and communities. A Mawiomi meeting room, using the Mi’kmaq word for gathering, is meant to hold ceremony, teaching, and meetings. Signage is planned in English, French, and Mi’kmaq. Dominic LeBlanc, posting as a New Brunswick minister when construction of the wing was launched, said that from 2028 federal scientists would be in “cutting-edge labs right here in Moncton.”

The 2026 construction detail that matches those lines is wood. Diamond Schmitt, on its studio account, said mass timber installation had started, with Nordic Structures fabricating the structure and sitting in design-assist with the architects and BMR/Entuitive. Mass timber replaces concrete and steel for about 25% of the building structure. Services run in access flooring so the underside of the CLT slab can stay exposed, cutting ceilings, drywall, and paint.

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That is how a net-zero brief shows up on a job site: a timber frame going up beside a live fisheries lab, not a finished atrium in a brochure.

A High School Field Becomes a Staging Yard

Downtown felt the project before anyone hangs a whale. On April 20, 2026, Moncton city council voted 9-1 to rezone the former Moncton High School sports field off Church Street as a temporary parking lot and staging area for ASEC. The field is supposed to store materials and heavy equipment, hold contractor vehicles, and keep access open to a 545-space hospital parking lot that the build would otherwise cut off. The field is to be put back when construction ends, unless an older 2017 condition on occupying the vacant school is met.

Neighbours had already told council they feared noise, dust, and traffic on a blind hill. Councillor Charles Léger refused a stop-sign plan and pushed the vote from March into April over crash risk on Church Street. Deputy Mayor Paulette Thériault backed going ahead, citing the scale of federal spending. Paul Stewart, a senior project manager at Pomerleau, told council the other option was parking upwards of 200 workers somewhere else and shuttling them in.

That fight is the local cost of keeping a federal lab open during an eight-year rebuild. The science wing can rise on Université Avenue only if trucks, timber, and crews have somewhere to sit. A vacant high-school field became that somewhere.

PSPC still says the science wing will take people in 2028 and the rest of ASEC will run in 2032. Mass timber is already on the frame, sensors are already in the old labs, and Church Street is already carrying the extra load. The next date that will prove or break that schedule is the 2028 move-in, when staff are supposed to walk into the new wing so the college wall can come down.