Kanata

Kanata is made up of many separate and distinct neighbourhoods, each with their own character and charm. Divided into Kanata North and Kanata South by the 417 (Queensway), Kanata North comprises Beaverbrook, Village Green, Kanata Lakes, Heritage Hills, Morgan’s Grant, Shirley’s Brook, and several rural communities such as Dunrobin, Constance Bay, rural Kanata, and Kinburn. Kanata South is made up of Glencairn, Katimavik, Bridlewood, Emerald Meadows, Trailwest, and Monaghan Landing.

Best known for its burgeoning high-tech sector in Kanata’s Research Park — the largest business technology park in Canada — Kanata is known playfully as the Silicon Valley of the North. Because of this high-tech hub, Kanata offers excellent job opportunities and attracts a highly-educated and skilled workforce from around the globe.

With a higher-than-average household income, Kanata offers a lifestyle that is second-to-none for single professionals, families, and seniors alike.

Single family (freehold) homes and townhomes tend to dominate the Kanata real estate market, but you will also find many condos, apartments, and several new luxury apartments in this Ottawa neighbourhood as well.

The Locals

Kanata is definitely a family-oriented area, but there are many single professionals, professional couples, retirees, and seniors living here as well. The Kanata Seniors’ Centre is a vibrant hub offering recreation and healthy-lifestyle programming to the 55+ crowd.

As Kanata is home to the largest business technology park in Canada, the community is also home to a large number of highly-educated and highly-skilled members of the tech industry – responsible in large part for driving the local economy and defining the local culture.

The Best Parts

Local residents of this Ottawa neighbourhood can literally find everything they require right in Kanata. With a huge selection of shops, restaurants, big-box retailers, as well as local businesses and boutiques, everything is close at hand.

Renowned for its green space, Kanata boasts many parks, walking and cycling trails, three golf courses, and a host of formal and informal recreational centres.

Kanata Then

Development west of the greenbelt started in the 1960s with Beaverbrook and was spearheaded by developer Bill Teron, who had a clear vision for this totally planned community. He saw clusters of homes within distinctive village communities revolving around a city centre while maintaining the natural spaces and incorporating the beautiful rock outcroppings.

The original plan for Kanata saw 120 hectares allotted to a research and development area, and during the 1970s’ microchip revolution, Kanata quickly became an epicentre for high tech entrepreneurs.

Kanata is a Huron-Iroquois word that means “meeting place,” which guided Teron’s vision to marry together Kanata’s residential neighbourhoods with its other-purpose lands.

Kanata Now

Today, Kanata is a large, thriving suburb offering all sorts of local conveniences catering to people of all ages. There are a wide variety of excellent schools and recreational and shopping opportunities so residents can live, play, and work locally.

Kanata is well-known for its wide variety of excellent schools: public and Catholic elementary schools, French public schools, and French Catholic schools, secondary schools, and private schools. Kanata is also renowned for its green spaces, parks, and recreation facilities such as the Richcraft Recreation Complex, the Kanata Leisure Centre and Wave Pool, the Kanata Recreation Complex, and a whole host of local community centres offering indoor and outdoor recreational spaces. The Canadian Tire Centre is home ice to the Ottawa Senators. Kanata is home to 110 parks and three golf courses, including The Marshes, home to PGA events and a qualified wildlife sanctuary.

As expected in a suburban community such as Kanata, travel by car is most common, although OC Transpo makes regular stops throughout Kanata’s neighbourhoods and provides express buses for more direct travel downtown in peak hours, as well as connecting to the O-Train’s Confederation Line at Tunney’s Pasture.