Culver City evolves from sleepy community to urban center

MONTREAL • It’s been roughly 20 years since a real estate developer built a privately owned commercial office tower in Montreal. Now Cadillac Fairview Corp. is betting that its new 26-storey, 514,000 square-foot building in the city’s downtown core will usher in a new era of cutting-edge office space as light-filled, fresh-air workplaces replace the stuffy, sleep-inducing bureaus of old. Whether there will be sufficient demand in an economy barely treading water remains to be seen. Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan-owned Cadillac has experience on its side.

OTTAWA — VIA Rail says it will review its security procedures following the arrest of two men alleged to have plotted an attack against one of its train routes. Safety procedures largely take place behind-the-scenes, said a spokesman for the Crown corporation, unlike the visible police presence and bomb-sniffing dogs that roam stations used by American passenger train service Amtrak.

In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Canada’s commercial and passenger railway system has not been considered a significant security threat. The same held true even after attacks on rail systems in Madrid, London and Mumbai.

The $63-million, six-story project in L.A. is being built by NMS Properties near a light-rail station along Metro's Expo Line.

If Keystone XL is not approved by the Barack Obama administration, it will unleash shock waves through the halls of policymakers in Canada and the United States alike given the bilateral importance of energy security, notes Greg Pardy, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “Progress on Canada’s export pipeline solutions would likely become its top national priority,” Pardy says.

While companies such as Gibson are biting off small chunks of the pipeline business away from TransCanada Corp. and Enbridge Inc., others such as Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railway are taking increasingly large mouthfuls. Gibson Energy Inc. has moved millions of barrels of energy products across North America via injection stations, pipelines and a fleet of more than 1,900 trucks, but it never felt the need to build a freight, or unit, train to carry crude. Until now.

CALGARY — It takes, on average, about six days to barge 150,000 barrels of oil sands crude along inland waterways from north of St. Louis to the refining hub of St. James on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. The route, including passage on the Mississippi River, is one being marketed by Jeffersonville, Ind.-based American Commercial Lines Inc. to oil sands companies hit hard by price discounts as an alternative path to the Gulf Coast refining corridor as major projects such as TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL have become mired in controversy and U.S. politics.

Enbridge Inc on Monday said it will partner with privately held Canopy Prospecting Inc. to develop rail facilities that will deliver 80,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the Bakken shale prospect in North Dakota to Philadelphia refineries by the third-quarter of 2013. The $68-million project will upgrade existing tracks to accommodate 120-car trains, lease a power generation facility, refurbish a 200,000-barrel tank and work on Philadelphia-area pipelines to deliver the crude, the company said.