The Ottawa Police Service is looking for a new location to house its main training facility after Algonquin College issued a notice of termination on a leasing arrangement that will force a relocation by the end of 2025.
Located in Building P of the west-end college, which has come to be known as the Police & Public Safety Institute, the professional development centre has been relied on heavily by the OPS to train its recruits and officers for over 20 years.
The site was built during the college’s construction boom in the early 2000s, and maintains its rustic, red-brick, early elementary school-like look today. The facility has been a hub of educational activity ever since — offering students in the college’s Police Foundations program valuable learning opportunities through its partnership with OPS.
The facility not only features traditional classrooms, offices, and study areas, but also includes a simulation lab, a defensive tactics studio, and a firing range.
The decision to end OPS’s lease on the facility comes at the same time the university finalizes its Master Campus Development Plan, which will “guide the evolution” of the campus over the next 10 years to support the college’s growth needs.
The MCDP was approved by the college’s board of governors in February.
The decision has also come at “the most challenging fiscal times in the college’s history,” Algonquin president Claude Brulé stated in a memo released in early January.
The college — hit hard like other postsecondary institutions in Canada by new federal restrictions on the number of international students in the country— projects a $32- million revenue loss in the fiscal year 2024-25 and an anticipated $60 million for 2025-26 without mitigation measures.
The college is ending a large number of its programs in a dramatic cost-cutting effort.
The non-renewable notice on the lease of the training facility will not only affect the OPS, but will also limit valuable, hands-on learning experiences that the program’s partnership with OPS has offered students over the years — including Elise Nizio, who is currently in the Police Foundations program.
“I’ve been able to see the new officers train and use it as motivation,” Nizio recently told the Algonquin Times. “The idea that I would be in their shoes eventually almost felt like motivation.”
The OPS is looking for a new location to train recruits while negotiating with the college to retain access to the building’s firing facility for an additional five years.
Another possibility for the relocated training facility is to make use the new south-end police headquarters being built in Barrhaven, according to OPS Deputy Chief Steve Bell.
It was time the OPS developed a training facility independent of the college anyway, Bell said in an interview with CBC.
