Google plans $735M project on agricultural land near Montreal

MONTREAL • Google plans to acquire land southwest of Montreal on which it will build its first Canadian data centre at an estimated cost of $735 million.

The property in Beauharnois, owned by Hydro-québec, covers 62.4 hectares and is currently zoned as agricultural land, the provincial government said Monday in a statement. Compensation measures are planned to mitigate repercussions on the territory and agricultural activities, the government said.

“Every day, demand for Google services is increasing, and our physical infrastructure follows the same rhythm,” the American tech giant said Monday in a blog post. “Once acquired, this site in Beauharnois will ensure we have options to expand our data centre infrastructure into Canada when our business requires it.”

The new facility will help Google meet its goal of running its entire business on clean electricity by 2030.

Google called the investment “an important addition to our long-standing presence in Quebec.” The company set up shop in Montreal in 2004 with its first downtown office and three employees. New offices on Viger

St. will have the capacity to house up to 1,000 employees when construction is finished.

Although Google declined to provide a timeline for the project, the company said that at its peak, construction of the Beauharnois facility will require 300 to 500 people. The future data centre should employ “dozens of people, at least 20 to 30 in skilled roles,” according to the company.

“The growth of a company the scale of Google in Quebec confirms our status as one of the world’s most dynamic and greenest technology hubs,” Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon said in a statement.

As compensation for the decision to de-zone the Beauharnois property, the Quebec government said an equivalent area nearby will be included in the agricultural zone and entrusted to the Fiducie agricole Upa-fondaction, a Quebec trust that aims to preserve the province’s agricultural heritage.

Monday’s announcement touched off a firestorm of criticism from environmental and farming groups alike. It comes about two and a half years after CPTAQ, the provincial commission for the protection of agricultural land in Quebec, issued a preliminary opinion opposing a request by the city of Beauharnois to de-zone the area.

“The adoption of a decree

that allows a foreign multinational to get its hands on targeted land without going through the established process sets a deplorable and worrying precedent,” Jérémie Letellier, head of the Union des Producteurs Agricoles du Québec for the Montérégie region, said in a statement. “Preferring residential, commercial or industrial development to the nourishing vocation of our agricultural lands and bypassing the mechanisms in place to protect them will not ensure Quebec’s food autonomy.”

The move, “which opens the door to a politicization of de-zoning in Quebec, must never be repeated,” Letellier stressed.

Montérégie is home to some of Quebec’s highest-quality agricultural lands and most favourable climatic conditions. Arable lands only represent about two per cent of the Quebec territory — compared with ratios of 45 per cent in the U.S. and 58 per cent in France.

“We’re disappointed. It looks like good news, but it’s really a way to put a green label on a project that isn’t green at all,” Coleen Thorpe, executive director of the environmental group Equiterre, told the Montreal Gazette by telephone.

Promoters “didn’t demonstrate that there were no other non-agricultural lands available for this use,” she said. “One could think that there were in fact other possibilities, but that the project would have been more expensive for the company.”

By overruling the CPTAQ’S objections, Quebec is “undermining the commission’s authority,” added Thorpe. “The more you build on agricultural land, the more the land is fractioned and the easier it becomes for other promoters to ask for further de-zoning.”