There must be something wrong with Sheldon Lee’s phone line. The New Brunswick transport minister told a Moncton newspaper last month that truckers aren’t complaining about the toll highway that will link Fredericton and Moncton because “the trucking industry will be big winners with this highway, and they know it.”

The big winner will be the provincial government, says Ralph Boyd, president of the Atlantic Provinces Trucking Association.

Using the current toll structure, the cost for a round-trip will be $44 for a five-axle vehicle, $55 for a six-axle rig. One average truck making one return trip a day can expect to pay over $20,000 a year in tolls, Boyd says. Tolls could have been set at half the rate and the government still would make a profit on the highway. As it stands, the provincial government could garner a $300-million profit over the life of the deal, Boyd says.

In January, the New Brunswick government announced it had signed a $584.4 million contract with the Maritime Road Development Corp. to build a new, four-lane highway between Fredericton and Moncton, guaranteeing it will be open to traffic within four years. The consortium includes Miller Paving, one of Canada’s largest highway builders; Dragados FCC Internacional de Construccion, S.A., of Spain, the leading designer/builder/operator of toll highways and bridges in the world; and GTMI (Canada), a partner on the Confederation Bridge project.

The highway is scheduled to highway open by Nov. 30, 2001.