British Columbia is where the Canadian prevention principle came from, and it is the only province with a serious candidate for a judgment that actually put time at large. That candidate is Hawl-Mac. It is from 1985, it is first instance, and most national commentary writes as though it does not exist.
This page carries a proposition the rest of the Canadian literature does not. The widely repeated national statement. That no Canadian court has ever determined time at large, is contradicted by a British Columbia decision that two independent indexes place at (1985), 10 CLR 177. Whether the contradiction is real depends on words in a judgment nobody in this corpus has read. That is said in the sentence wherever the point arises below, and it is not softened anywhere else.
The evidence rule for this page is the strict one. No BC judgment was read in original text. CanLII and bccourts.ca blocked automated retrieval, so every case proposition here rests on two or more independent reputable secondary sources and carries no paragraph pinpoint. Statutory and contract-form material is flagged separately where its provenance is different. For the pan-Canadian doctrine this page does not repeat, see the Canadian prevention principle and time at large, for the rest of the province's delay law, the British Columbia extension-of-time hub.
Can time be at large in British Columbia?
Yes, on the strongest authority available anywhere in Canada, and that authority is a 1985 BC Supreme Court judgment. Hawl-Mac Construction Ltd v Campbell River (District), (1985), 10 CLR 177, 1985 CanLII 342 (BCSC) is reported as holding that a failure to grant an extension of time in time meant the owner could not rely on the original completion date and could not enforce liquidated damages. That is the operative consequence of time at large.
, and it is stated squarely because it cannot be resolved from secondary sources. A national legal-press treatment states that no Canadian court has ever found time at large, that beyond a passing reference in Perini and a handful of cases the concept has not been thoroughly considered by the Canadian courts, and that the doctrine "has featured prominently in private arbitrations". Two construction-press and firm sources treat Hawl-Mac as a BC decision holding time at large. Both can be true at once: Hawl-Mac produced the result, but whether the judgment used the language of time at large, or reached the same place by finding a breach of an express term, cannot be determined without the text.
| Position | Where it comes from | What it claims |
|---|---|---|
| No Canadian finding of time at large | A national legal-press piece on time at large | The concept is under-considered by Canadian courts and lives in private arbitration |
| BC has one | Two construction-press and firm sources | Hawl-Mac held a late extension decision defeated the completion date and the liquidated damages |
| The corpus position | Reconciliation of the two | Hawl-Mac is the strongest candidate for a Canadian finding of time at large, subject to verification of the primary text, and the contrary view is recorded alongside it |
Layer: inferential, and comparative between commentators. Both rows rest on the secondary tier (no primary judgment text was read) so the third row is a reading of the sources, not a holding of any court.
What Hawl-Mac is reported to decide, and four reasons for caution
Three propositions, all directly on point, and all resting on secondaries. First, the owner or engineer must determine a new completion date within a reasonable time after the request for an extension was made. A BC decision on the actual operation of a contractual extension mechanism, which this corpus otherwise lacks anywhere in Canada. Second, failure to grant an extension in time sets time at large: the contractor is no longer required to complete by a specified date but within a reasonable period, and liquidated damages cannot then be enforced. On the facts, the engineer's breach of a seven-day extension duty meant the owner could not rely on the original completion date. Third, and marked , a no-damage-for-delay clause was not enforced.
Now the reasons to be careful, all four of which belong in any submission that relies on it. It is 41 years old. It is first instance, and no BC appellate court has adopted or applied it in the accessible record. It is reported in the Construction Law Reports, a series many practitioners outside the specialty never open, which is a large part of why it has stayed invisible. And it is largely absent from national commentary, including the commentary that asserts the opposite proposition. The trial judge could not be identified in any accessible source. The judgment is on CanLII at 1985 CanLII 342 and should be pulled before the quoted words are relied on.
The seven-day window itself is worth pausing on, because it is unusually short. CCDC 2 and FIDIC contemplate nothing like it, and a BC reader coming to Hawl-Mac from a modern form should not assume the same duty exists in their contract without finding it.
Illustrative only, how the mechanism is reported to work
A contractor requests an extension for owner-caused delay. The contract requires the engineer to rule within seven days. The engineer rules two months later, well after the original completion date has passed. On the reported holding in Hawl-Mac, the owner cannot then insist on the original completion date, the contractor's obligation becomes completion within a reasonable time, and the liquidated damages clause is inoperative. This is an illustration of the reported mechanism, not a summary of the facts of the case, which were not available in primary form.
Why the answer matters more in BC than the national commentary suggests
Because it changes what a contractor does about a broken extension-of-time mechanism. If Hawl-Mac is right, then in British Columbia an owner or certifier who lets an extension request sit unanswered past the completion date is not merely in breach of an administrative duty. It has forfeited the completion date and, with it, the liquidated damages. That is a materially stronger answer to a defective or unadministered mechanism than the national commentary offers.
It also explains a gap. There is no BC authority on whether an extension of time may be granted retrospectively, after the completion date has passed. The nearest BC material is Hawl-Mac, which addresses the converse: an extension granted too late does not save the completion date but sets time at large instead. The inference (stated as an inference) is that BC has never had to decide the retrospective-extension question because Hawl-Mac resolves the practical problem in the contractor's favour by a different route.
The defensible way to plead it: Hawl-Mac is the strongest candidate for a Canadian finding of time at large, subject to verification of the primary text, and the national commentary asserting that no Canadian court has found time at large should be read against it.
Both national prevention anchors are British Columbia cases
The Canadian prevention principle is BC law twice over, and this is the part of the page that does the least new work. Perini Pacific Ltd v Greater Vancouver Sewerage & Drainage District, (1966), 57 DLR (2d) 307 (BCCA), aff'd [1967] SCR 189 is the Canadian statement of Dodd v Churton: an owner is not allowed to insist upon the penalty for delay if, by ordering extra, it has prevented the builder from completing by the specified time. N.B.C. Mechanical Inc v A H Lundberg Equipment Ltd, 1999 BCCA 775 carries the liquidated-damages consequence.
Both are developed at the Canada level rather than here, see the Canadian liquidated damages page but the fact that both are BC decisions is itself the point. An Ontario or Alberta contractor running a prevention defence is arguing on British Columbia and English authority, and should say so rather than be caught by it. One refinement is worth recording and is marked : on the reading in the corpus, N.B.C. Mechanical means that once owner conduct has prevented performance within the deadline, contractor delay on other aspects of the work becomes irrelevant to the liquidated damages clause. If that reading holds, it is more contractor-friendly than the modern English position, and it is BC's implicit answer to concurrency in the prevention context. See concurrent delay and apportionment in BC.
And then the province stops. No BC decision after 2000 was located applying Perini Pacific to find prevention on construction facts. The prevention line appears after 2000 only in the CIMIC arbitral award, and before 2000 in Kei-Ron Holdings Ltd v Coquihala Motor Inn Ltd, [1996] BCJ No 1237 (BCSC) itself , a general application of the principle that no party may take advantage of the non-fulfilment of a condition whose performance it has hindered. Note the styling the corpus records: "Coquihala", not "Coquihalla". Search both.
| Authority | Citation | What it actually carries |
|---|---|---|
| Perini Pacific | (1966), 57 DLR (2d) 307 (BCCA), aff'd [1967] SCR 189 | Prevention by ordering extras, or owner-caused critical delay, defeats the liquidated damages or penalty |
| N.B.C. Mechanical | 1999 BCCA 775 | The owner cannot enforce liquidated damages where its own conduct caused critical delay |
| Hawl-Mac | (1985), 10 CLR 177 (BCSC) | Prevention, or breach, by failing to operate the extension machinery in time |
| Foundation Co v UGG | (1997), 91 BCAC 254 (BCCA) | An extension is permissive. A contractor need not seek one to claim delay damages |
Layer: jurisdictional, these are British Columbia rules. Every row rests on the secondary tier under this cluster's evidence rule: two or more independent sources agree on citation and proposition, no primary judgment text was read, and no paragraph pinpoints are given.
An extension of time is permissive, not mandatory
This is the most under-known proposition in BC delay law, and it is appellate. Foundation Co of Canada Ltd v United Grain Growers Ltd, (1997), 91 BCAC 254, (1997), 33 CLR (2d) 159 (BCCA) establishes that an extension of time is permissive rather than mandatory, and, the part that matters most in practice. A contractor is not obliged to seek an extension of time in order to claim delay damages.
Take that slowly, because it disposes of a defence owners run constantly. The argument that a contractor who never applied for an extension has thereby given up its delay damages does not reflect BC law as reported. Entitlement to be paid for owner-caused delay and entitlement to relief from the completion date are separate questions, and losing or never running the second does not extinguish the first. For a claimant who has been advised that its failure to work the extension machinery is fatal, this is the case to read first. It is BCCA authority, it is from 1997, and (like everything else here) it has not been revisited.
The same judgment does two further things that a BC pleading should use together. It apportioned delay at appellate level, owner and engineer 75% and contractor 25%, which is why BC concurrency is a damages exercise rather than an entitlement one. And it barred the owner's own delay counterclaim because the owner had deliberately withheld notice of that claim until a strategically advantageous moment, notice in BC cuts both ways, and the first question in any BC delay defence is whether the owner complied with its own notice obligations. See notice and time bars in BC.
The owner's answer. The sweep-up clause, and the gap it leaves
An owner meets a prevention argument by pointing at the contract: the act complained of is a listed extension event, the machinery covers it, so time never went at large. That answer works only as far as the clause reaches, and on CCDC 2 – 2020, GC 6.5.1 and GC 6.5.3.4 the reach is narrower than practitioners assume. GC 6.5.1 covers delay by the Owner, the Consultant or anyone employed or engaged by them contrary to the provisions of the Contract Documents, a qualifier that excludes owner conduct which is merely attributable to the Owner without breaching anything. GC 6.5.3.4, "any cause beyond the Contractor's control", is expressly time-only unless the delay in fact results from Owner or Consultant action.
The consequence is that the CCDC sweep-up is narrower than the JCT and FIDIC equivalents, which leaves more room for an owner act to fall outside the machinery altogether, the classic Peak v McKinney gap, and the space in which a time-at-large argument lives. Read the supplementary conditions before running any of this: they almost universally amend GC 6.5, and the amended clause is the one that governs.
Then the two things BC has never decided, both searched. There is no BC citation of Multiplex Constructions (UK) Ltd v Honeywell Control Systems Ltd, [2007] EWHC 447 (TCC), of Adyard Abu Dhabi v SD Marine Services, [2011] EWHC 848 (Comm), or of North Midland Building Ltd v Cyden Homes Ltd, [2018] EWCA Civ 1744. So expect the owner to argue the Multiplex proposition, that a functioning extension clause defeats prevention and note in reply that no BC authority adopts it. Expect Adyard-style insistence on actual rather than theoretical prevention, and note the same. And on new BC projects drafted with a North Midland-style allocation of concurrent-delay risk to the contractor, note that BC has never considered whether such a clause is effective. On the corpus's assessment that is the largest open question in BC delay law as at 10 August 2026.
No damage for delay, and relief from forfeiture, two untested interfaces
Two doors an owner will try to close, and BC law on both is older than the tests that now govern them. Hawl-Mac is reported as a case in which a no-damage-for-delay clause was not enforced and the contractor recovered out-of-pocket expenses despite wording barring "delay-related losses arising from whatever cause", a proposition this corpus marks , because it rests on secondary description of a judgment nobody has read. The reported reasoning is a construction one: such clauses will not be enforced where they do not clearly prohibit the specific claim type.
No BC decision construes a no-damage-for-delay clause after Tercon Contractors Ltd v British Columbia, 2010 SCC 4. BC's position is therefore a pre-Tercon, construction-based line Hawl-Mac and Litchfield Bulldozing Ltd v PCL Construction Ltd, (1985), 14 CLR 287 (BCCA) and any account of how a BC court would apply the three-stage Tercon framework to such a clause is prediction, not authority. Say so in the submission rather than presenting a predicted outcome as settled law. It is worth adding that no Canadian jurisdiction prohibits such clauses by statute, so the whole question is one of construction and unconscionability rather than legislative override.
The second door is the time bar, and here the finding is flatter still. No BC decision applies Law and Equity Act, RSBC 1996, c 253, s 24 relief from forfeiture to a construction notice provision or time bar. The visible s 24 jurisprudence is insurance and residential tenancy. The argument is open and untested, which is neither a recommendation nor a warning off, but a statement of what a court would be being asked to do for the first time. Expect the counter-argument that a contractual notice period is a condition of entitlement rather than a forfeiture, and that s 24 therefore has nothing to operate on.
Where the doctrine now lives, and how to run it from 1966, 1985 and 1997
In arbitration, and that is why the case law stopped. CIMIC Morningstar Investments Ltd v Chandos Construction Ltd, 2026 BCCA 2 is a leave refusal, and must never be cited as an appellate statement of doctrine. What the corpus records, and no more, is this: the underlying arbitral award involved a finding that the owner's design changes and late approvals put time at large so that liquidated damages could not be enforced, the award was approximately CAD 6.47M. The owner argued the doctrine does not apply to CCDC 2. And leave to appeal was refused under Arbitration Act, SBC 2020, c 2, s 59. The Court of Appeal held only that the arbitrator's application was not an extricable question of law. It said nothing about whether prevention or time at large is correct in law under CCDC 2. A BC-seated arbitral finding of time at large, left undisturbed, that is the accurate description, and the section number should be re-checked against the consolidated Act, because this corpus obtained the Arbitration Act text from the Bill 7 (2020) third-reading version.
Nor is there another forum in which this doctrine could be developing. There is no adjudication in British Columbia today, because the Construction Prompt Payment Act received Royal Assent on 27 November 2025 and is not in force as at 10 August 2026, and when it is proclaimed it will apply only to contracts entered into after commencement, so essentially every BC contract live today will never be subject to BC adjudication. Even then, the register records as unresolved whether a BC adjudicator could grant time: delay will be adjudicable in substance through the change-order and valuation heads: which expressly reach approved and proposed change orders, and so are wider than Ontario's, but declaratory time relief is uncertain. See arbitration, experts and forum in BC.
If it does, breach of it is the cleanest BC route, and it is the route Hawl-Mac took on a seven-day duty. Plead the breach of the express term first and prevention second, so the argument survives even if the time-at-large label is contested.
Hawl-Mac is reported to supply it. A new completion date must be determined within a reasonable time of the request. It is a first-instance 1985 judgment and should be pleaded as such, with the primary text pulled from CanLII first.
Perini Pacific and N.B.C. Mechanical are the anchors, and both are BC appellate decisions doing national work. The prevention argument does not depend on Hawl-Mac being right about time at large.
On the corpus's unverified reading of N.B.C. Mechanical, once owner conduct has prevented timely performance, contractor delay elsewhere is irrelevant to the liquidated damages clause. Mark the reading as unverified when you rely on it.
Foundation Co holds that an extension is permissive and that a contractor need not seek one to claim delay damages. A failure to work the machinery is not, on that authority, the end of the delay claim.
The owner's counterclaim in Foundation Co was barred for strategically withholding notice of its own delay claim. This is the first question in a BC delay defence, not the last.
Which leaves the position to state plainly to any client, and to any practitioner arriving from Ontario, Alberta, England or the United States. A British Columbia prevention argument today is built from 1966, 1985 and 1997, one appellate decision affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada sixty years ago, one first-instance judgment reported only in the Construction Law Reports, and one Court of Appeal decision now nearly thirty years old, supplemented by N.B.C. Mechanical from 1999. The province that gave Canada its prevention doctrine has added almost nothing to it since.
That silence is a searched finding, not a gap in the research. No BC judgment between 2015 and 2026 is squarely a large-project extension-of-time or delay decision, and the only appellate delay activity in the window is the CIMIC leave refusal. The causes are traceable: arbitration capture, time at large "has featured prominently in private arbitrations", and BC's most significant finding of it in forty years sits in a confidential award, the near-unreviewability of an arbitrator's reading of a delay clause under s 59, a construction docket reaching judgment that is dominated by residential and lien practice, and BC firms now writing about Ontario cases, with national concurrency surveys of 2021 and 2025 citing no BC case at all. The doctrine is still being made in British Columbia. It is simply not being reported.
Sources et jurisprudence
- Hawl-Mac Construction Ltd v Campbell River (District) (1985), 10 CLR 177, 1985 CanLII 342 (BCSC)The strongest candidate for a Canadian judgment finding time at large. The owner or engineer must determine a new completion date within a reasonable time of the request, failure to grant an extension in time, in breach of the engineer's seven-day duty, meant the owner could not rely on the original completion date and liquidated damages could not be enforced. A no-damage-for-delay clause was also not enforced, the contractor recovering out-of-pocket expenses.No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation and holding rest on two or more independent secondary sources. The citation is verified twice, but the holding directly contradicts the widely repeated claim that no Canadian court has found time at large, treat it as the strongest candidate, not as settled. The trial judge could not be identified in any accessible source, and the no-damage-for-delay proposition is unverified. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Perini Pacific Ltd v Greater Vancouver Sewerage & Drainage District (1966), 57 DLR (2d) 307 (BCCA), aff'd [1967] SCR 189The Canadian statement of the prevention principle. A building owner is not allowed to insist upon the penalty for delay if, by ordering extra, he has prevented the builder from completing the work by a specified time.No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation and holding rest on two or more independent secondary sources. One source characterises the case as one in which neither party could recover delay damages and no apportionment was made, and another lists it as confirming the enforceability of no-damage-for-delay clauses, both readings are unverified and neither is adopted here. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- N.B.C. Mechanical Inc v A H Lundberg Equipment Ltd 1999 BCCA 775An owner cannot enforce liquidated damages where its own conduct caused critical delay. On the refinement recorded in the corpus, contractor delay on other aspects of the work becomes irrelevant once owner conduct has prevented performance within the deadline.No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation and holding rest on two or more independent secondary sources, and the refinement about contractor delay elsewhere is unverified. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Foundation Co of Canada Ltd v United Grain Growers Ltd (1997), 91 BCAC 254, (1997), 33 CLR (2d) 159 (BCCA)An extension of time is permissive rather than mandatory, and a contractor is not obliged to seek an extension of time in order to claim delay damages. Delay was apportioned at appellate level, owner and engineer 75% and contractor 25%, and the owner's own delay counterclaim was barred because it had deliberately withheld notice of that claim until a strategically advantageous moment.No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation and holding rest on two or more independent secondary sources. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Kei-Ron Holdings Ltd v Coquihala Motor Inn Ltd [1996] BCJ No 1237 (BCSC)A general application of the principle in Boon v R, [1934] 3 DLR 161 (SCC), that no party can take advantage of the non-fulfilment of a condition the performance of which has been hindered by himself.No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus, and this entry is unverified as to both citation and holding. It rests on a single survey. Note the styling recorded in the corpus, "Coquihala" rather than "Coquihalla", search both spellings. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- CIMIC Morningstar Investments Ltd v Chandos Construction Ltd 2026 BCCA 2Leave to appeal an arbitral award was refused. The arbitrator had read a ten-day written notice requirement in context, found the owner had actual knowledge, found the owner's design changes and late approvals materially contributed to the delay, applied the prevention principle to hold that time was at large so that liquidated damages could not be enforced, and awarded approximately CAD 6.47M. The owner had argued that the doctrine does not apply to CCDC 2.A leave refusal, not an appellate statement of doctrine. The Court of Appeal said only that the arbitrator's application was not an extricable question of law, it said nothing about whether prevention or time at large is correct in law under CCDC 2, and the underlying award is not public. No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus. The citation and description rest on two or more independent secondary sources. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Arbitration Act SBC 2020, c 2, s 59Appeals from an arbitral award lie only on a question of law with leave, the route by which leave was refused in CIMIC.The text of this Act was obtained from the Bill 7 (2020) third-reading text, not from the consolidation, so the section number should be re-checked against the consolidated statute before it is relied on. The application of the provision to a delay award rests on secondary commentary.Chercher sur CanLII →
- CCDC 2 – 2020 Stipulated Price Contract GC 6.5.1, GC 6.5.3.4GC 6.5.1 covers delay by the Owner, the Consultant or anyone employed or engaged by them, but only where that delay is contrary to the provisions of the Contract Documents. GC 6.5.3.4, "any cause beyond the Contractor's control", is expressly time-only unless the delay in fact results from Owner or Consultant action, in which case it converts to a compensable claim.The CCDC document was not obtained as a primary text for this article. Clause numbers are verified against publicly available contents pages and converging secondary sources. The operative wording is reconstructed from those sources rather than quoted from the form. Supplementary conditions almost universally amend GC 6.5 and must be read first.
- Tercon Contractors Ltd v British Columbia 2010 SCC 4The three-stage framework governing any exclusion clause, including a no-damage-for-delay clause.A Supreme Court of Canada decision on a British Columbia appeal. No judgment was read in original text for this corpus. The citation and holding rest on two or more independent secondary sources. It appears here because no BC decision has construed a no-damage-for-delay clause since it was decided. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Litchfield Bulldozing Ltd v PCL Construction Ltd (1985), 14 CLR 287 (BCCA)Part of the pre-Tercon British Columbia line on no-damage-for-delay clauses.No BC judgment was read in original text for this corpus, and this entry is unverified as to holding. It is held on a single survey, and only the citation and its place in the pre-Tercon line are recorded. Verify on CanLII before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Law and Equity Act RSBC 1996, c 253, s 24The general relief-from-forfeiture power. No BC decision applying it to a construction notice provision or time bar was located.Unlike the Builders Lien Act, the text of this Act was not obtained from BC Laws for this corpus, so the section content is not primary-verified, the chapter number is recorded in the corpus and is a known trap. The negative finding rests on a search of the visible s 24 jurisprudence, which is insurance and residential tenancy. Verify before pleading.Chercher sur CanLII →
- Multiplex Constructions (UK) Ltd v Honeywell Control Systems Ltd [2007] EWHC 447 (TCC)The English position that prevention does not set time at large where the contract provides for an extension of time in respect of the relevant events.No judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation is recorded in the corpus's prevention notes. It appears here only as the argument an owner will make and which no British Columbia court has considered, there is no BC citation of it.Chercher sur Find Case Law →
- Adyard Abu Dhabi v SD Marine Services [2011] EWHC 848 (Comm)The English requirement of actual prevention, rather than a theoretical possibility of prevention.No judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation is recorded in the corpus's prevention notes. It appears here only as part of a searched negative finding, no BC citation of it was located.Chercher sur Find Case Law →
- North Midland Building Ltd v Cyden Homes Ltd [2018] EWCA Civ 1744The English authority on a contractual allocation of concurrent-delay risk to the contractor.No judgment was read in original text for this corpus, the citation is recorded in the corpus's prevention notes. It appears here only as part of a searched negative finding, no BC citation of it was located, and whether such drafting is effective in BC has never been decided.Chercher sur Find Case Law →
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Dans cet article
- Can time be at large in British Columbia?
- What Hawl-Mac is reported to decide, and four reasons for caution
- Why the answer matters more in BC than the national commentary suggests
- Both national prevention anchors are British Columbia cases
- An extension of time is permissive, not mandatory
- The owner's answer. The sweep-up clause, and the gap it leaves
- No damage for delay, and relief from forfeiture, two untested interfaces
- Where the doctrine now lives, and how to run it from 1966, 1985 and 1997