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Brigil Construction will have to return to the drawing board if they plan to go ahead with their ambitious Place des Peuples mixed-used condo development in front of the Museum of History, says the board of a French private school that owns part of the land on the proposed site.

The College Saint-Joseph de Hull never agreed to sell the land located at the corner of Rue Notre-Dame-de-L’ile and Rue Élisabeth Bruyère, currently used as a school parking lot, to Brigil. However, the developer’s architect Douglas Cardinal designed one of the 55-storey towers on the school land.

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St. Joseph College board president Nicole Paquin said in a press conference Tuesday morning that Brigil president Gilles Desjardins and his special advisor, and former Gatineau mayor, Yves Ducharme, had requested a meeting in June to discuss swapping the land for another piece of nearby land they had yet to acquire.

Photo by Paula McCooey / Ottawa Citizen

“We didn’t reject their offer, we didn’t say anything,” said Paquin. “We told him that we are against this project here, that it would be bad for the school…at that time they told us they didn’t need our grounds because the way it was built that was only for little shops. So we thought OK he doesn’t need it. But then after, he didn’t phone us or ask us anything, and he changed his plan and the building was built on our lot.”