Confederation Heights Newsletter - August 2024

Welcome to the Confederation Heights newsletter. We hope you are enjoying the summer sun with friends and family.

As work continues to create a preferred Master Plan concept option for Confederation Heights, the project team would like to provide you with some updates since presenting the three draft concept options to the public late last year. Here is a summary of activities.

Optimizing the Federal Real Property Portfolio

Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) is developing a long-term plan to optimize the space under its responsibility, lower operating costs and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The aim is to reduce the PSPC-administered office portfolio by 50% over the next 10 years.

PSPC already declared two federal buildings at Confederation Heights as surplus to the Government’s needs: the Sir Charles Tupper Building and 1500 Bronson Avenue. Recently, 875 Heron Road, another federal building at the site, was added to the list of surplus buildings for disposal.

PSPC continues this work with the expectation that additional buildings will be identified as surplus in future, which may include other properties within Confederation Heights. The project team will keep you updated.

You can visit PSPC's Optimizing our real property portfolio website to learn more about the department's portfolio plans and the building disposal process.

Status of the Three Master Plan Concept Options

The feedback that the project team has and continues to receive is incredibly valuable and informs much of the work that is being done towards a preferred Master Plan concept option. This feedback comes from the public, the consulting team, the Public Advisory Committee, the Technical Advisory Committee, stakeholders and approval authorities.

Since the fall, the team has completed technical analysis on the three concept options in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team. This analysis considers urban planning and design best practices, landscape architecture, ecology, heritage, sustainability, transportation, accessibility, and wayfinding among others. The analysis conducted is done through the lens of the project’s vision and guiding principles, with a goal of identifying which elements from each option best achieve the overall Master Plan vision.

Following the workshops last fall, the team has been engaged further with various stakeholders, including Carleton University, the RA Centre, Health Canada, National Capital Commission, and the City of Ottawa. Additionally, as we consider social equity within the Master Plan, we are pleased to be integrating our consultant retained to establish a social equity strategy for Confederation Heights.

With the Federal Budget 2024 highlighting CLC’s important role in helping to provide much-needed housing in Ottawa by getting federal lands such as Confederation Heights ready for development, the project team anticipates being able to present a preferred Master Plan concept option to the public in late fall 2024 or early 2025.

We look forward to seeing you later this year, and hope you have an enjoyable rest of your summer.

The Confederation Heights Team