Heading to court: contractor says Detour Gold owes them money.

• Author: Ross, Ian
• Position: CONSTRUCTION - Detour Gold Corp. and North America Construction

A southern Ontario contractor claims Detour Gold owes them more than $66.4 million for excavation and construction work performed at the company's flagship Detour Lake gold mine project in northeastern Ontario.

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North America Construction (NAC) has filed two statements of claim in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Cochrane against the Toronto miner and its affiliated Trade Winds Ventures of Vancouver.

NAG claims it's owed $58 million for concrete work and $8.4 million for excavation work performed at the massive and remote open pit mine and mill project now under construction, 180 km northeast of Cochrane.

The Morristown, Ont.-headquartered general contractor has slapped three construction liens for work performed by the company between November 2010 and April, 2012.

The project marked the 75 per cent construction completion mark in late June.

North America Construction provides master building services to civil, municipal, biofuels, energy, mining and industrial sectors across Canada.

NAC states during the course of construction, there were numerous unforeseen challenges soon after signing the two contracts in late 2010.

The contractor claims Detour was negligent and breeched its contracts on a host of issues including the late arrival of the final construction drawings and on the handling of the project, which drove up NAC's costs, expanded the scope of its work, and forced it to bring in extra labour.

A subcontractor, with familiarity of the project, said NAC's original workforce was to peak at 300, but the company ended up bringing 745 workers on site:

The original contract for the concrete work, signed in December 2010, was for $61.9 million, but NAC said costs soared to $129,640,000. The contractor has been paid $71.3 million, but $58 million is still. outstanding.

On the excavation side, NAC said the original $18.1 million contract ballooned to more than $29.5-million by last December. Detour has paid more than $20 million,

NAC carried out the concrete work for the foundations of the mill processing facilities, crushing operation, mine maintenance and office buildings at the site, along with handling the earthworks and excavation side, including stripping 25 hectares of overburden, blasting rock and crushing aggregate.

NAC claims the job was plagued with problems early on with incomplete construction drawings at the time of tender that pushed back the original completion date from Dec. 31, 2011 to April...