Halifax Shipyard is Irving Shipbuilding's yard on Halifax Harbour in Nova Scotia. Shipbuilding on the site goes back to the Halifax Graving Dock Company, which began operating in 1889. The yard built four Tribal class destroyers between 1942 and 1947 and the St. Laurent class destroyers between 1951 and 1957, and came into Irving Shipbuilding in 1994. In 2011 it was chosen as one of two centres of excellence under Canada's National Shipbuilding Strategy and given the combat package, 21 vessels over thirty years, and in August 2014 the last steel truss was installed on a modernisation costing more than 400 million dollars.
Construction is under cover, in an assembly and module hall 408 metres long and 46 metres high. The yard keeps a graving dock, used for docking work periods on the Royal Canadian Navy's Halifax class frigates, and has contracted an OmniLift shiplift rated at more than 30,000 tonnes on 56 chain jack stations of 640 tonnes each, to serve the River class destroyer programme and later repair work. Two other Irving plants feed the yard from Dartmouth across the harbour: Marine Fabricators, with 9,270 square metres of production space, cuts, forms and kits steel that is trucked to Halifax, and Woodside Industries fabricates vessel sections and offshore structures.
Current work is naval. Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships delivered to the Royal Canadian Navy are Harry DeWolf in 2020, Margaret Brooke in 2021, Max Bernays in 2022, William Hall in 2023 and Frederick Rolette in 2024, with a sixth, Robert Hampton Gray, started in 2022, and two variants for the Canadian Coast Guard begun in 2023 and 2024. Work on the River class destroyers opened with a production test module in 2024 and the keel of the first ship, the future HMCS Fraser, has been laid; Lockheed Martin Canada and BAE Systems are the programme partners. Repair runs alongside newbuilding, principally frigate docking work periods. Earlier Irving programmes include nine mid-shore patrol vessels for the Coast Guard between 2009 and 2014 and twelve Kingston class coastal defence vessels from 1994.