JOSHUA ALLAN
The 1510 West
It was with a heavy heart that Nicole MacDuff watched workers last Wednesday tear down the pet boarding facility she had been operating in Dorval for the last 35 years. The demolition is part of an expansion plan being carried out by Trudeau Airport.
“They always said they would never need this land, so we kept (renting),” said MacDuff in an interview. “When they told us they need all the land around the airport and they need to make some parking lots, we were in shock. I couldn’t believe it.
“It’s so sad,” she added, noting how she has been receiving many messages of support from customers since the centre, known as Manoir Kanisha, ceased operations Jan. 31.
Earlier this spring, Aéroports de Montréal (ADM) announced an ambitious $4-billion redesign project of the airport that is targeted to be completed by 2035. The plan includes construction of a new terminal, pickup and drop-off areas and expanded parking lots. And given that the tracts of land surrounding the airport are federally owned and managed by the ADM, the airport did not require to consult with tenants that rented space in this area nor municipalities in the region.
In March, elected officials in Dorval and Montreal, as well as the neighbouring borough of St. Laurent, spoke out against the airport expansion, particularly the plans to build on 167 hectares of green space just northwest of the airport. This area includes Golf Dorval and the Monarch Fields, which will be developed over the next 20 years in what ADM has dubbed a “decarbonization zone.”
“The best decarbonization zone is exactly what we have today,” Dorval Mayor Marc Doret said at a press conference in March, alongside St. Laurent Borough Mayor Alan DeSousa, Montreal city councillor Alex Norris and former Quebec and federal representative Clifford Lincoln. “It’s a natural greenspace.”
They argued in favour of the green space being preserved and protected from future development.
“Once it’s gone, it’s gone,” Doret said in a subsequent interview.
The ADM did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
As for MacDuff, who built her business in 1990 on land controlled by the airport authority, she is now spending her days sending refund cheques to clients who had reserved many months in advance for their pets to stay at the facility. Conveniently located next to the airport, the centre offered boarding services to both local pets whose owners were travelling, as well as for pets coming from abroad whose owners, for one reason or another, were unable to pick them up for several hours, days or even weeks. Rather than leave a pet to linger in its cage, pet owners or airport officials would reach out to MacDuff, who would send a member of the team within minutes to pick up animals and bring them to her facility.
“We started with a field,” she said last week, describing the original property. “There was nothing. There was just a lot of grass. We cut the grass and we started to build.”