Montreal's Sanaaq community centre opens across from Cabot Square

CBC News

· Posted: May 12, 2025 4:55 PM EDT | Last Updated: 4 minutes ago

A caller municipal taste and assemblage centre has opened successful Montreal crossed from Cabot Square.

It's a portion of the metropolis that has faced challenges implicit the years. Inuit communities determination person expressed the request for much assemblage spaces tailored to their needs. Many different residents successful the country person besides called for much resources, similar schools.

Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante welcomed everyone to the Sanaaq Cultural and Community Centre connected Friday, saying they're "welcome not conscionable contiguous but successful the coming days, the coming year. It's our centre, it's your centre."

It's a spot for visitors to read, listen, dance, talk and create, said Kitty Gordon of the Makivvik Corporation, a determination Inuit enactment representing Nunavik successful bluish Quebec.

"It opens a spot for look successful each of its forms," she said.

Rhoda Kokiapik, Avataq Cultural Institute director, said determination are astir 3,000 Inuit surviving successful Montreal.

"We travel present for work. We travel present for higher education. We travel present for aesculapian needs. Montreal has a large relation successful our lives," she said.

The metropolis says the centre was built to bespeak the taste diverseness of the neighbourhood with a absorption connected music, integer exertion and Indigenous communities.

According to the city's website, the centre volition supply a much-needed hub for the culturally divers Peter-McGill district. Located connected the tract of the erstwhile Montreal Children's Hospital adjacent Atwater metro, the abstraction spans 5,000 quadrate metres implicit 2 floors.

It volition diagnostic a library, show hall, media lab, municipality agriculture abstraction and assemblage café.

Developed successful adjacent collaboration with section residents and implicit 35 organizations, the Sanaaq Centre follows a participatory governance exemplary wherever programming and services are shaped by the assemblage itself, the metropolis says.

Named aft Sanaaq, an Inuit caller by Mitiarjuk Attasie Nappaaluk, the centre's architecture was selected done an planetary competition. It emphasizes earthy light, wood and antiauthoritarian design, the metropolis says.

The $40-million task was funded by the City of Montreal and Quebec's taste improvement agreement.

There was small speech of the costs astatine the inauguration. However, the city's Official Opposition has voiced concerns astir the outgo of renting the gathering during the clip starring up to its opening — calling the $5.9 cardinal spent to rent the unused gathering a discarded of nationalist funds.