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There is urgency now.

In early November, the Department of National Defence — the largest employer in the national capital region — will begin moving in. By the end of March, the first wave of 3,400 employees is expected to fully occupy Building 8 (as the military now calls it) and three adjacent structures.

Two years after that, if all goes to plan, 8,500 DND employees will have shifted to the 370-acre campus along Carling Avenue from dozens of downtown locations.

Thus will rise a new, state-of-the-art DND headquarters — a Pentagon North — that’s expected be spur major change to the culture of the department and to the lives of its employees.

It’s one of the largest corporate moves in Canadian history. It will rival in scale the remaking of downtown Gatineau in the 1970s, when the federal government built the Place du Portage complex to accommodate 10,000 office workers, in large part to spread bureaucracy more evenly across the region. That project forever altered the face of downtown Gatineau and influenced commuting patterns, housing markets and retail throughout the urban core.

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Eight years in the making, the new DND headquarters project will reveal much about the ability of the federal government and its contractors to execute large-scale projects.

While Public Services and Procurement Canada, the department that along with DND and Shared Services is overseeing the project, maintains the overall effort is on time and on budget, the arrival of the first wave of employees is easily a year behind schedule.