A Yukon Supreme Court justice has thrown out a local engineer's claim that the territorial government owes him money because it sullied his reputation and acted unfairly by no longer issuing him sole-source contracts.

Up until 2003, Robb Ellwood regularly did mechanical engineering jobs for the Yukon government - contracts which were given to him by the government's property management agency (PMA).

But in 2003, after submitting reports on two jobs, the agency complained about Ellwood to the Association of Professional Engineers of Yukon.

According to the first complaint, Ellwood had used unprofessional tactics to get a contract to assess ventilation issues in one Whitehorse school, then failed to provide any solutions to the problem in his final report, say court documents.

On a second concurrent project, the agency complained, and Ellwood refused to make a number of changes to his designs for a different school's boiler room.

Both of these complaints were dealt with by the engineer association's discipline committee, which found "that Mr. Ellwood's work on the ventilation contracts fell short of good engineering practice."

It also found he had acted unprofessionally in refusing to take direction from the property management agency.

Ellwood appealed to the association's council, but lost when it came to the same conclusion as the discipline committee.

The snubbed engineer then took his plea one step further, to the Yukon Supreme Court. There, Justice Ron Veale upheld the finding of unprofessional conduct in the boiler room case, but overturned the decision that Ellwood's ventilation report was insufficient.

That was not the end of the matter.

Ellwood brought the dispute back to supreme court last year and demanded that the government pay him damages of almost $800,000 ($10,000 a month beginning April 2003, plus $66,420 worth of legal fees).

Ellwood claims he had a special relationship with the government and relied on government contracts as his main source of income.

Because of that relationship, the government owed Ellwood a "duty of fairness," he claimed, and that when it complained about Ellwood's performance, it caused Ellwood "suffering, pain, anguish, grief, distress, humiliation, loss of reputation, wounded pride and reduced opportunity to to obtain work."

The judge however, disagreed.

"I find as a fact that the PMA was fully justified in pursuing its discipline complaint against Mr. Ellwood. That I dismissed the complaint against him relating to the ventilation contracts does not suggest that this court found the dismissed discipline complaint was in any way inappropriately or negligently initiated," Veale said in his latest decision.

Although Ellwood told the court he was not pursuing a claim of malicious prosecution or defamation in regards to the complaint made by the government, Veale addressed the possibility of those charges.

On both, he found the government had acted well within its rights in complaining to the professional engineers' association about one of its member's performance.

As far as the money Ellwood claimed, Veale again found in favour of the PMA.

Although the agency had a history of giving Ellwood sole-sourced contracts (jobs under $10,000 or $25,000 which can be contracted out without a bidding process), Ellwood lost any privilege he may have had when he acted unprofessionally.

Therefore, he was "the author of his own loss," Veale decided.

In his conclusion, the justice wrote, "it would be an unfortunate precedent for the PMA to have a duty of care to continue providing sole-source contracts to a contractor based upon a previous history of doing so.

"The point of having the sole-source contract exception to the general public tender is that it provides a quick and cost-effective process for small contracts, not a guarantee of continued sole-source contracts."