Gatineau-based real estate firm Devcore has unveiled plans to invest up to $1 billion over the next decade on a new hotel and thousands of residential units at the site of the Nav Centre in Cornwall, Ontario. The 630,000-square-foot conference, hotel and training facility overlooking the St. Lawrence River will undergo a massive  transformation and expansion, with a portion of the hotel suites slated for conversion into student apartments to serve nearby post-secondary institutions, including St. Lawrence College and Ottawa’s La Cité.

Nav Canada will remain the primary tenant of the complex, which has been renamed the Dev Hotel and Conference Centre. The complex was once Nav Canada’s primary training facility until the agency decentralized its operations 15 years ago, and the building became Cornwall’s main meeting and convention hub. Devcore president Jean-Pierre Poulin told the Ottawa Business Journal that he sees “massive untapped potential” at the 75-acre Nav Centre site, which drew about 35,000 visitors annually before the pandemic struck in March 2020.

Equipped with new green energy technology, Poulin said Denvore’s vision for the Nav Cenre site is to make it “the smartest and most sustainable village in the world,” akin to the nearby Zibi community. Plans include using chilled water from the St. Lawrence River to cool the hotel, residential units, and convention centre in the summer while methanol from the city’s sewage plant would be used to heat the buildings in the winter, potentially generating hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual energy savings.

For more, visit Devcore.com