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A group of elected officials is urging the federal and provincial governments to force the city’s hand so it respects a promise to extend Cavendish Blvd. in Montreal’s West End.
Called the Cavendish Coalition, the group — comprised of three MPs, four MNAs, four mayors and two city councillors — penned a letter to federal Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser urging him not to fund any housing projects at the Namur-Hippodrome district unless there is a commitment to building the Cavendish extension.
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“It has long been recognized that the Cavendish link should be built as a corridor of sustainable mobility that would provide many advantages for the eco-quartier Namur-Hippodrome (QNH) as well as the surrounding area of the island of Montreal. This project would provide a much-needed north-south axis connecting employment and commercial centres in St-Laurent and T.M.R. with residents and businesses through Côte Saint-Luc, C.D.N./N.D.G. all the way to Lachine and LaSalle in the Sud-Ouest,” the letter to Fraser stated.
In the Montreal region’s planning documents for decades, there was finally some momentum on the project to link the end of Cavendish Blvd. in Côte-St-Luc to the point where it ends in the St-Laurent borough by linking both ends of the road to Royalmount Ave. A notice of project was sent to the province’s Bureau d’audiences publique sur l’environnment in 2022, and environmental impact studies were supposed to be ordered last year in order to proceed with public consultation.
However, the Plante administration has refused to award the studies, and in its master plan for the Namur-Hippodrome sector — which foresees 20,000 new housing units — the extension of Cavendish Blvd. has been omitted.
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The mayors of Côte-St-Luc and Town of Mount Royal see Cavendish as key to accessing the Namur métro station and planned developments like Royalmount, the transformation of Décarie Square and the Côte-St-Luc shopping centre, as well as relieving congestion or at least providing motorists an alternative to the Décarie Expressway. It’s also seen as a key to accessing the St-Laurent industrial park.
The group points out that the city’s plan to build on the Hippodrome site relies heavily on hundreds of millions in aid from the provincial and federal governments, as it will cost an estimated $1.4 billion just to build the roads and sewers. So far, no levels of government have committed to support the project.
They urged Fraser to make any funding for a housing project at Namur-Hippodrome dependent on the extension of Cavendish Blvd.
The group is also urging the provincial government to force the city’s hand to build Cavendish by enforcing the agreement by which the province ceded the land that formerly housed a horse-racing track to the city in 2018. Under that agreement, the province gave the land to the city at no cost under two conditions: that a housing development be built on the site and that the Cavendish extension be built.
The group is also calling on the province not to fund any development in the neighbourhood without the realization of the Cavendish project. D’Arcy-McGee MNA Elisabeth Prass plans to table a petition with those demands at the National Assembly when it resumes sitting after the summer break.
The Cavendish Coalition is made up of St-Laurent MP Emmanuella Lambropoulos, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce—Westmount MP Anna Gainey, Mount-Royal MP Anthony Housefather, Notre-Dame-de-Grâce MNA Desirée McGraw, D’Arcy-McGee MNA Elisabeth Prass, St-Laurent MNA Marwah Rizqy, Mont-Royal—Outremont MNA Michelle Setlakwe, Côte-St-Luc Mayor Mitchell Brownstein, St-Laurent borough mayor Alan DeSousa, Hampstead mayor Jeremy Levi, T.M.R. mayor Peter Malouf, Côte-St-Luc city councillor Dida Berku and Côte-des-Neiges—Notre-Dame-de-Grâce city councillor Sonny Moroz.
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