Not sure, but should be passing by there next week and will try to get a look around. In the meantime, this story was published a couple of days ago;

Davie shipyard in Quebec groans to life after barely dodging liquidation
Mon Jul 2, 6:40 PM

By Les Perreaux

LEVIS, Que. (CP) - The Davie shipyard, a Canadian industrial giant that came to the brink of liquidation, is groaning back to life once again.

Across the vast dockyard with giant hangars of high-tech welding machines, cranes and massive assembly lines, tiny pockets of workers are kicking this sleeping behemoth back to its feet.

Some 170 mechanics, welders and maintenance workers are operating in small teams to resuscitate machinery that was installed a decade ago, thanks to government largesse, but has barely been used.

The workers scurry around the shipyard on bicycles, reviving one machine after another to meet an August deadline.

That's when hundreds of workers will start to pour back into the shipyard of Davie Quebec where they will bend and weld the steel hull of the first major vessel to be built here in a decade.

The first of three 130-metre, offshore construction ships will start to rise from the enormous concrete trench known as the Champlain drydock. The projects are worth US $400 million. In a year, the shipyard expects to have 600 full-time workers. The first ship is scheduled for delivery in April 2009.

"We have a lot of people coming back here soon, so we've got a lot of work to do to make sure everything's ready," Denis Fournier, an operations and training manager at the shipyard across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City, says in an interview.

"We'll be ready."

Davie is the biggest shipyard in Canada and one of the oldest, dating back to 1825 and the dawn of industrial Quebec.

At its height, when it floated a veritable fleet of warships through the Second World War, Davie employed 5,000 and continued to thrive for a few decades afterwards.

Clues pointing to how close Davie came to disappearing from the Canadian industrial map just last year are scattered around the shipyard.

One massive building once used to launch ocean-going vessels is full of bins of pipes and tools. They are marked with lot numbers for the final liquidation sale that was about to begin last summer.

"That's how close we were to being sold piece by piece," says Fournier.

"Look at all that stuff ready to go," he adds, pointing at dozens of welders lined up like automobiles in a used car lot.

The latest effort to rescue Davie came from Norway's Teco Management in 2006, when it bought the bankrupt shipyard for the bargain basement price of $28.4 million, complete with tax breaks and loan guarantees form the local and provincial governments.

Four months later, the company signed a deal with Norway-based Cecon ASA to build three ships, with an option for three more. Cecon specializes in deepwater pipe-laying for the oil industry.

A general recovery in the shipbuilding industry and a boom in offshore oil development in Norway were the keys to the rescue of Davie after 10 years in bankruptcy, according to Davie Quebec president Gilles Gagne.

"The market we have now wasn't the situation two or five years ago," Gagne said in an interview.

"It's the market that created this opportunity. We're getting more calls in a week now than we got in a year seven or eight years ago."

Davie is unlikely to return to the days of the 1960s and '70s when it built massive cargo ships and ferries. That business has moved to China and won't come back soon, Gagne says.

Instead, Davie will concentrate on building high-tech ships, platforms and other equipment for the oil industry for the short term. In the long term, a return to building high-tech navy ships will be an additional target.

"We will not try to compete with (Asian shipyards) on regular vessels, product tankers and things like that," Gagne says.

"But it's easier to compete in the market we are looking for, the offshore market, and the high-value products that are not necessarily contemplated by these yards."

The Davie shipyard was founded by George Taylor and Capt. Allison Davie, a builder of river steamboats and square-rigged sailing ships.

The shipyard flourished through the '60s and '70s under the ownership of Canada Steamship Lines (1920-196 and Power Corp. (1968-1976), cranking out ferries, cargo and warships.

After a quick succession of owners, Davie landed in the hands of Dominion Bridge. After the Quebec government spent more than $100 million helping the company update equipment, the firm promptly went bankrupt.

"They took us down with them," quips Fournier.

Canadian navy frigates launched in the early 1990s was the last line of major ships to be built at Davie.

During 10 years under bankruptcy, trustees and shipyard managers searched for a new owner while maintaining the shipyard and taking on projects refurbishing vessels and oil platforms.

They were preparing to sell off the shipyard when the 11th-hour bargain was struck with Teco.

Gagne says Teco plans to place Davie Quebec under a publicly traded subsidiary called Davie Yards ASA.

News of the Norwegian takeover hasn't triggered the usual laments about a Canadian company falling into foreign hands.

That's a long way from 1989 when the mere rumour the Quebec government might sell its interest in the shipyard to New Brunswick's Irving family sent Quebec nationalists into a frenzy.

"Could all this have been done by a Canadian proprietor?" Gagne says. "I'm sure it could have, but it didn't happen.

"It was certainly on the market long enough (for a Canadian buyer to step forward) but I don't really want to get into questions of nationalism."