First announced over two years ago, construction is beginning on the Lac Mirabel Mega Mall. Twice as large as the West Edmonton Mall, the business plan is simple: Spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create a larger version of something that already exists in Montreal, but make it bigger so people will want to travel 40 minutes by car to get there instead. Expect that the sheer bigness of the project will turn it into a tourist destination and kick-start the economy of the entire region which will only get bigger with all the urban sprawl.

In Mirabel. Where no one has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a giant development project only to see it fail.

Well, at least this project is being funded privately by businesses instead of by the government. And it looks like many businesses have already signed up. We’ll see if the project lives up to the hype after it opens in 2009.