Ha, this is hilarious. Doormat, is definitely correct, it is that shape to help alleviate with the ice flow. As someone who was once stuck on a ferry for nine hours instead of the usual 45 minutes, because it couldn't break through some exceptionally heavy ice, I can assure you it definitely gets very heavily iced over in the winter time. There are sometimes parts where the tide keeps it broken into huge chunks but some of our local species are actually not indigenous but crossed over on the ice during winter. Like Coyotes! Grrr!
Pretty much the entire Gulf of St. Lawrence ices up in the winter time. Here is a live Internet camera on the bride, It looks like you could skate to the mainland today.
Confederation Bridge Live Eye It is an amazing feat of engineering actually. It took over 4 years to build, cost 1.3 Billion dollars, and the project employed over 5000 people over it's lifetime. Four people died from falls or construction related deaths but that was actually considered a good number because the company 'budgeted' for up to 10 deaths as they actually expected more in a project of this size.
All pieces were assembled on land and then floated out to sea on the worlds largest floating crane called the Svanen. It in itself was impressive. Hard to tell how really big it is in this picture until you look closely and realize that the t-shaped thing on the right is actually one of hundreds of center spans that you drive on. It must still be on land in the background as it's not under the lifting device of the super-barge.
They would float out and place the bridge bases on the ocean floor with accuracy that had to be within inches because they would then take out one of these center spans and drop them to rest between the two bases.
I'm rambling but it was incredible to watch it grow. I was offered an IT related job around the networked payroll system for the project actually but I declined for reasons I won't go into.
