A 19th-century hotel at 9975 Rue de Belle Rivière in the Ste-Scolastique village of Mirabel, north of Montreal, almost didn’t survive past the 1960s.
It was called the Hôtel Longtin back then, and was one of the properties expropriated to build the Mirabel airport.
Luc Longtin still remembers the pain the expropriation caused his parents.
“Oh it was really bad,” he recalled. “They didn’t know where to go. All of a sudden, you have to leave.”
Monday, though, brought some closure for him and other descendants of property owners. Aéroports de Montréal (ADM), which oversees the airport, announced it is leasing just over 41,000 square metres of land near the airport, for a dollar, to the Centre de mémoire collective de l’expropriation de Mirabel (CMCEM), a group representing the families of expropriated land.
“They wanted a site,” ADM president and CEO Philippe Rainville told Global News. “They have a project, they wanted to put some memento on the site and they wanted a good site, so they were insistent, which is good.”
Members of the group plan to create a site to commemorate the families’ struggles and will include a monument designed by sculptor Armand Vaillancourt.
“This centre will be the place — their place — to talk about what happened, really,” explained Denise Beaudoin, co-founder of the CMCEM.
“Most of the people in Quebec or in Canada, they don’t know what happened here.”
In 1969, the Canadian government bought around 39,000 hectares in the area to build the Mirabel airport, affecting some 3,000 families who Beaudoin says still remember.
“The second generation and the third generation, when we talk about that, they cry,” she pointed out. “They cry because they saw their house burning, they saw their parents really anxious.”
Not all the land was cleared and eventually the government sold some of the property back. Longtin bought back the hotel in 1986 and became the last generation in his family to own it.
“They paid, well, not enough of course, but when we bought it back, that was OK,” he said.
Longtin sold it 17 years ago, moved away and the name changed to Auberge Belazur. But the project announced Monday next to Highway 50 on the way to the airport makes he and his family happy.
“Except for the noise,” quipped Lise Leduc, laughing.
They say at least it’ll be easy for the public to access.