Place Cartier became the Outaouais’s first mall in 1965, just a few short years before Joni Mitchell released her classic 1970 song Big Yellow Taxi with the line “they paved paradise, put up a parking lot” — a call to action to stop the damage to our planet.
Fifty-five years later, developer Brigil is heeding that plea with a $1.3 billion vision to turn the long-neglected mall back into something much more appealing. It’s a long way from a fait accompli, but Brigil has taken the first steps towards transforming the 17-acre concrete desert at Saint-Joseph and Saint-Raymond boulevards even as the company waits for Gatineau’s updated strategic plan to be put into place so that it can present the master plan to the city.
“It’s clear that business models for commercial centres are evolving, especially in today’s economic context. This idea of city-in-city development is an interesting response to that shift, by bringing housing options closer to services,” Hull-Wright Coun. Steve Moran said of the project via email. “It’s encouraging to think that residents could benefit from new green spaces and local shops designed to be easily accessible on foot or by bike. That said, we’ll need to see the formal plan filed with the city before offering a more detailed opinion.”
Brigil founder Gilles Desjardins saw the potential of the site back in 2018, but his sons Kevin and Jessy, who both work with their father, took a little convincing. “Our first reaction was don’t touch it … it’s going to be super hard to redevelop and bring life to it,” remembers Jessy Desjardins, who is Brigil’s vice-president of development.
But his father shared how he saw the redevelopment, which included a mix of apartment residential, commercial space, public gathering spaces and plenty of nature, with taller buildings positioned along the main streets and lower ones at the back of the property, where it meets a neighbourhood of mostly bungalows and two-storey singles.
“And then it clicked,” Jessy says. “Kevin and I were like, ‘Oh my God, this is so cool.’” And so was born Espace Canevas, an empty canvas that “had that potential to start from a blank state and become something much bigger.”
Jessy Desjardins has become such a proponent of the project that he led a team to Copenhagen, Denmark, earlier this year to meet with the global landscape architecture firm SLA, which helped them refine the vision for the project’s outdoor spaces.
At its core will be an outdoor plaza reminiscent of the Parkdale Market in Ottawa, where events can be held under string lights and a giant pergola that’s part of the old mall’s skeleton. It will sit next to the only portion of the mall that will eventually remain: the old cinema building that is nostalgic for many in the area. Smaller plazas will dot the property and cutting through the site will be a treed bike path that connects Rue Gamelin and its nearby park (which is as big as Espace Canevas) and the rest of the development.
Surrounding the core will be several buildings, a mix of residential, commercial, retail and possibly institutional with the potential for 2,600 residential units, 192,000 square feet of commercial space and 182,000 square feet of office space.
Every step of the way, Brigil — which has since moved its head office to an existing office building on the site — has been careful to include the community in the planning. Shortly after buying the property, the company met with the two community associations in the area and conducted a survey to find out what residents wanted: a mix of housing and commerce, restaurants, other type of activities and cultural possibilities — needs that Rejéan Laflamme, president of the Association des Résidents Parc de la Montagne, feels Brigil is so far meeting.
“It’s wonderful, I think,” Laflamme says of Brigil’s proposal. “It was just a big parking lot that wasn’t used to the full potential. What Brigil is proposing is to use it completely.”
One of the first things Brigil did was to animate the mall’s back alley and connect it to the existing neighbourhood by cutting large doors in the façade so restaurants and other businesses in the back of the mall could open them up and have a “street presence” with patios facing the afternoon sun and the neighbourhood. It also added colourful murals to the building exterior, installed seating in the hill next to the alley for outdoor movie screenings and added benches and planters to liven the space.
“It allows us to use the back alley as a community space and event space,” Desjardins explains as he sits at one of the patios in the late summer sun. “On weekends we can have markets, we can have events. Two years ago, we had La Saint-Jean (Baptiste Day), our national holiday party. And there were 400 or 500 people here.”
Brigil has also created an indoor version in the mall of the proposed outdoor central plaza in a hint of what’s to come. It’s part of how the company is working to develop a project that will evolve well over time, partly because it’s an ambitious plan that will take many years to complete and may need to shift with market changes, and partly because the Walmart store in the mall has a lease that’s not due to expire for decades, which means it will be some time before the full vision of the site is realized.
In the first 15-20 years, Brigil expects to build about 1,600 residential units, with another 1,200 or so once Walmart departs. And about 60 per cent of the property will be devoted to outdoor spaces.
“We didn’t want to just have an empty mall, demolish it, then a construction site for five, 10 years and then hopefully having some interaction in the community afterwards,” Desjardins explains. “We wanted to create something that, from the get-go, had a sense of community, a sense of neighbourhood and culture, and help local businesses to set up shop.”
Local businesses already attracted to the site include the sushi shop Izakaya Kobachi, restaurant La Petite Soif by sommelier Véronique Rivest, Kearns art studio, the gift shop Habitude Design and the wellness centre Espace Hygie.
Even though Brigil does not yet have full site plan approval, construction is progressing on the first residential building, a six-storey rental building along Saint-Joseph that’s expected to be finished next summer. Phase two will be a tower on the northwest corner at Rue Berri and Saint-Raymond, where a Goodyear tire shop currently stands. It will have 12 to 15 storeys and will likely be rentals as well. Brigil is hoping for approval on that building in time to start construction as the first building finishes.
It’s a bit of a leap of faith to go ahead with parts of the project when the whole thing has not yet been approved, but Desjardins says they felt it was important to develop the vision with community input rather than present them with a full concept already approved. The buildings are also going up in such a way that any changes needed to the master plan won’t derail the vision.
Isabelle Cousineau, who was elected councillor of Parc-de-la-Montagne-St-Raymond, the district in which the project is located, in the November municipal election, is cautiously positive about the plan.
“The project, as publicly presented, does address some of our needs — especially the idea of creating a place where people can live, access services nearby and enjoy a well-rounded, complete neighbourhood,” she said via email. “But we also have some pressing challenges. Affordable housing is one of the biggest. The types of units typically found in this kind of project aren’t within reach for a significant portion of our population. In our neighbourhood in particular, we have many seniors living on fixed incomes and many of them will be looking for affordable housing that enables them to remain in their community, close to services, shops, and transit.” (The current plan includes 10 per cent affordable units.)
Desjardins is confident it will all work out. “You need three groups for a good project: the developer, the citizen and the city,” he explains. “The citizen — the residents — are quite on board, really happy. We’re quite excited, obviously, and I think the city is excited as well, so hopefully that will go very well.”
An edited version of this article ran in the Ottawa Citizen on Dec. 6, 2025.
