John Abbott College

John Abbott College (French: Collège John Abbott) is an English-language public college located in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, Canada, near the western tip of the Island of Montreal. John Abbott College is one of eight English public colleges in Quebec. The college primarily serves the Greater Montreal Region. The CEGEP shares grounds with McGill University's Macdonald Campus. History The college was accredited in 1970 and opened the next year. It is housed in early 20th-century buildings on a campus shared with McGill University's Macdonald College. The college is named after John Abbott, prime minister, and former mayor of Montreal who owned a country estate in nearby Senneville. He is most remembered for his role in the Pacific Scandal, the political corruption case which brought down the government of Sir John A. Macdonald in 1873. The college originally planned to build a new campus in Pointe-Claire next to Fairview Shopping Centre. It "temporarily" moved into buildings on the Macdonald College campus that had been vacated the previous year by McGill's Faculty of Education when it moved to its downtown campus. Additional temporary facilities were rented on Hymus Boulevard in Kirkland, known as the Kirkland Campus. A shuttle bus connected the two campuses. In 1973, the college decided to consolidate the college in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue by constructing a new building (subsequently named the Casgrain Centre) and renovating the existing buildings. The Kirkland Campus closed in December 1979, and the construction and renovations in Sainte-Anne were completed in 1981. It remained the last college in Quebec to be renting its campus until 2002, when it bought its buildings from the University. McGill University still owns and operates the majority of the land on campus.