Paddle River Dam, the subject of Opron v Alberta

It has been proving hard to find time to make as much progress as I would like with my book on Extra-contractual Recoveries. Every time I think I am going to have a bit of a window to crack on, some real-life work appears to intervene.
Nevertheless, I have been pushing on with the very interesting Canadian cases on negligent misstatement. Ironically, the fact that they never enacted anything along the lines of the Misrepresentation Act 1967 seems to have added fuel to the fire of misrepresentation claims there.
Opron v Alberta (1994) 151 AR 241 is a particularly interesting case, although it suffers from the blight of being a very long judgement. It does seem to be the case that very lengthy judgements, such as Alstom v Yokogawa (No 7), tend to miss out on the attention that they deserve simply because they are such a daunting read. Nevertheless, Opron is interesting, in that it comes quite close to establishing that an owner is under an obligation to provide tenderers with everything she knows about the relevant ground conditions, particularly if what she knows would be likely to persuade a tenderer to increase his bid. It is a rather unusual case in the sense that the court found that Alberta had been deceitful – courts usually fight shy of any finding of fraud if they can possibly help it, and in this case, the finding of deceit appeared to have added nothing in terms of the damages awarded to the findings of negligent misstatement. So although there is no suggestion the construction contracts are uberrimae fidei, in the same way as for example contracts of insurance, yet nevertheless there is some solid authority that owners are under a real obligation to “come clean” about what they know at tender stage, and no amount of weasel words or “risk allocation” will help them if they do not.