By Joel Goldenberg
The Suburban
The Canada Lands Company crown corporation held an open house recently to unveil its plans over the next seven years for a massive residential-commercial-cultural-greenspace project on the site of the 69-year-old former headquarters of the National Film Board on Côte de Liesse and Houde in St. Laurent.
The project will be 80 metres from the future Côte de Liesse REM station expected to be operational later this year, which means the NFB project will be part of a Transit Oriented Development (TOD).
The CLC, which specializes in real estate development, acquires strategically located federal sites that are no longer needed by the Canadian government. The corporation’s goal is to repurpose such sites and reintegrate them into the local community.
Christopher Sweetnam Holmes, the Canada Lands Company’s Senior Director for Real Estate for Quebec, told The Suburban during an interview on the NFB’s former soundstage that as part of the project, 80 percent of the existing NFB building will be preserved, while the rest will be demolished.
“We’re going to create three new hubs,” he added. “We’ll build 700 new units of housing, of which 50 percent will be non-market housing — social, affordable and non-profit. Then we’ll create a business and economic development hub, including spaces [along Houde] for local retail. Then we’ll create a culture and arts hub out of the unique spaces that are the legacy of the NFB, including this soundstage and the two theatres we have on the site.” Some 100 affordable housing units will be in the already existing National Film Board John Grierson office building on Houde, for which a non-profit developer will be selected, as was announced last year.
Holmes says it is too early in the process to know what the rents would be in the affordable and social housing units.
“We don’t build those buildings. We work with non-profit development partners and they have different clientele. They are the ones who propose the rents, but they have to fit in to the parameters of the City of Montreal and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation for affordability.”
Holmes said the soundstage where our interview was conducted will eventually become a production and presentation venue for possible cultural events such as theatre, dance and a circus.
“We’re still looking who the partners will be for that, but the spaces are super neat. Rebuilding this space would have cost tens of millions of dollars. It’s perfectly tuned acoustically.”
Before our interview, The Suburban spent some time in a greenspace in the back of the NFB building, which is in decrepit shape with broken benches.
Holmes said that area and another, with a path between them, will be transformed into attractive parkspaces, one of which will have the NFB logo in the grass to pay tribute to the history of the site.
Asked about the project timeline, Holmes said a zoning change from the borough and City of Montreal is expected in early 2026.
“We’ve been working with them for a couple of years in the planning,” he added, also saying that the community has been consulted in the last several months, with 600 people in person and 3,000 people online participating.
Once the zoning is approved, the construction could begin and the park will be decontaminated and the existing buildings will be transformed during 2026.
The entire site is 49,000 square metres (528,000 square feet), “equivalent to six football fields.” Nearly 9,000 square metres will be devoted to parks and greenspace. The residential section will include three new buildings, including one that will be 14 storeys and two that will be 12 storeys each, as well as the existing Grierson building. The plan is to have residents begin to occupy units in 2028, and some new uses in the existing building — now used by CÉGEP St. Laurent — next year. The commercial and office area will occupy 35 percent of the entire site.A new street will be created to connect to Carré Benoit, which the CLC says will “strengthen ties between neighbourhoods.” Place Benoît is known as a low-income area of St. Laurent. n