What happened: The court ruled a pipeline contractor cannot claim coverage under another party’s insurer after a punctured pipeline.
Who’s involved: Alberta Hot Line, Intact Insurance, Liberty Mutual, Enbridge, and Grand Rapids Pipeline.
What’s at stake: Whether working on a construction project makes a contractor an additional insured on someone else’s policy.
Why it matters: Additional insured status requires a direct written contract - being on site is not enough.
Where it stands: Decided November 6, 2026; cost submissions due within 30 days if parties cannot agree.
Drilling equipment punctured an Enbridge pipeline near Edmonton in 2017, and it took nearly a decade to resolve whose insurance should pay.
The Court of King’s Bench of Alberta found that oilfield services firm Alberta Hot Line (AHL) has no right to coverage under Liberty Mutual’s policy - the policy held by Grand Rapids Pipeline, the company whose contractor punctured the line.
At its core, the case asked a question that comes up on construction sites all the time: if you are working on a project, does that automatically put you on someone else’s insurance?
The court’s answer was blunt. No.
Enbridge hired AHL as its on-site field representative to monitor a project in which Grand Rapids was licensed to build new pipelines crossing Enbridge’s existing lines. Both sides carried their own insurance. AHL had a commercial general liability policy through Intact Insurance. Grand Rapids had one through Liberty Mutual.
On February 17, 2017, drilling equipment operated by one of Grand Rapids’ contractors punctured an Enbridge pipeline. Enbridge sued. AHL was among the defendants.
AHL and its insurer Intact then turned to Liberty Mutual, arguing that the crossing agreement between Enbridge and Grand Rapids required insurance broad enough to cover everyone connected to the project - including contractors working for Enbridge’s side.
The court disagreed. Reading through the crossing agreement, it found the deal was straightforward: each party agreed to get insurance covering itself and its own contractors, not contractors hired and supervised by the other side.
That structure matched the liability split. Grand Rapids was on the hook for what its own people did. Enbridge was on the hook for what its people - including AHL - did. The insurance followed the same line.
AHL also tried a second angle, arguing it qualified as an “additional insured” under Liberty Mutual’s policy. That policy extended coverage to parties that had entered into a written agreement with Grand Rapids in connection with the project.
The problem: AHL had no contract with Grand Rapids. None. AHL worked for Enbridge, was named in the crossing agreement as Enbridge’s representative, but was never a party to it.
The court found the point was plain. The policy’s requirement of a written agreement with Grand Rapids was there to keep coverage limited to Grand Rapids’ own contractors - not every firm that happened to be working on the same site.
AHL and Intact took one last shot, pointing to section 544 of Alberta’s Insurance Act, which lets insurers split costs when two policies cover the same loss. The court dismissed that too: since AHL was never covered by Liberty Mutual’s policy in the first place, there was nothing to split.
For anyone drafting or reviewing insurance clauses in construction or energy contracts, the ruling lands a clear message. If two parties to a project intend for one side’s insurance to also protect the other side’s contractors, the contracts need to say exactly that. The court noted it would have been possible for the parties to write that kind of broad coverage into the deal. They did not.
This decision addresses the insurance coverage dispute between AHL, Intact, and Liberty Mutual only. The status of the underlying Enbridge claim is not addressed in the ruling reviewed.
