Some promotional videos highlighting Dorval as a destination for potential investors and visitors are finally available on the city’s website.

About two years ago, the city had accepted a deal with CGI Communications, a U.S. Internet marketing company, to produce several short videos extolling the virtues of the lakeshore community and help promote it as a sound choice for people or industries looking to relocate or invest. Segments for the videos, which include a message from Mayor Edgar Rouleau, were shot just over a year ago. The mayor said that ensuring the English and French versions matched exactly caused delays until last week when the videos were posted online.

“We hope that people are going to go look at it,” Rouleau said, adding the city’s website already has had good traffic. “It’ll be interesting to see how this comes out.”

There was no cost to the city.

“For us, these are marketing tools. The marketing company, they get their money with the ads and the things that they sell (to businesses),” Rouleau said.

“The reason we wanted to go ahead with this was the fact that we have the airport, we have a very large and important industrial and commercial sector,” he continued. “If you want to develop, people will go where the activity is. And for us, it’s a question of showing Dorval is more than just a residential district, it’s more than an airport and it’s more than just industrial/commercial and that we offer all the services that we have. This is important. It shows all that we can offer.”

While there is not much vacant land remaining in its industrial sector north of Highway 20, Rouleau said some of it can and will be targeted for redevelopment and modernized.

“It’s where we are going in the future,” he said. “If you ask how much land is left to developed, it’s about zero. Dorval’s industrial and commercial sector was developed 50 to 60 years ago. Those buildings are not up to date in today’s market so what is happening is we see a promoter coming in and tearing up the old buildings and building new ones.”

CGI generates revenue from such deals by selling ad spots to local businesses that will border the video links. So far, only a few company logos with links, some working, some not, have been posted around the Dorval videos, such as Novartis, Medic emergency services, as well as a local veterinarian and chiropractor.