Pods for the people!

CSE is looking to enlarge its headquarters complex. 

When CSE's purpose-built facility, the Edward Drake Building, was completed 12 years ago, its 2,200-person capacity was supposed to accommodate the entire agency. 

But CSE just kept growing, and when in 2018 the agency's IT Security arm absorbed large parts of the cybersecurity programs of Shared Services Canada and Public Safety Canada to become the 800-strong Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, it became necessary to exile that entire arm of the agency to a separate building of its own. Initially, the Cyber Centre occupied six floors of the 10-story commercial office building at 1625 Vanier Parkway; it may well occupy the entire building by now. 

CSE has since grown to nearly 4,200 employees, of whom probably something like 1,400 work for the Cyber Centre, mostly at the Vanier Parkway building. Unless the remaining staff have already started overflowing into temporary accommodations, that leaves something like 2,800 mostly from the SIGINT and cyber operations side of the agency all trying to squeeze themselves into Ed Drake. (Now, now, keep it clean, folks.) 

And CSE is still growing. It is likely to hit 4,500 employees by the end of this fiscal year, and the number may well top 5,000 before 2030. In the agency's most recent annual report, CSE Chief Caroline Xavier stated that "CSE is entering a period of sustained expansion and transformation." For the moment at least, it has the money to back up those plans, its budget having almost doubled in the last two years. 

So, it should come as little surprise that CSE is planning to get back in the construction business. 

According to an Advance Procurement Notice posted by Defence Construction Canada in November 2025 (tip of the hat to the Globe and Mail's Steven Chase for catching it), CSE "is planning a project that involves the design and construction of a self-contained, purpose-built extension, which will be physically integrated to their existing building infrastructure. This building will serve as an extension of current operations, providing additional space to support business growth and specialized functions. This project may include a new parkade. This project will include design of the new space, build and connection of the new space to existing building. The estimated cost [of] construction of the proposed Modified Design-Build (MDB) Contract is in the range of $150M-$300M. It is anticipated that this solicitation will be initiated in Summer 2026."

The proposed building is dubbed "CSE New Building 8." (The Drake Building currently consists of a data warehouse, a central atrium called the Hub, and seven "pods" that contain work spaces and labs. Presumably, the new building will become Pod 8.)  

According to this website, new office buildings in Ottawa currently cost about $200-$400 per square foot (i.e., $2,150-$4,300 per square metre) to construct. I don't know how reliable that estimate is, but I do think it's too low for the kind of very-high-security construction CSE requires. 

The cost of the Edward Drake Building was around $10,500 per square metre at its time of construction. I'm pretty sure that a large part of that cost, perhaps half of it, went to the computer systems and other equipment that filled the complex, which is separate from the cost of construction of the building itself. Even so, accounting for inflation since 2014, we might still be looking at a construction cost today somewhere around (waves hands furiously) $7,000 per square metre for CSE.

Even at that relatively high cost, however, a $150-$300 million budget can pay for a sizeable building: something in the ballpark of 21,500 to 43,000 square metres. 

That would be a pretty big "pod". If dedicated to work spaces, a building in that size range could accommodate 1,000-2,000 people, maybe even more. 

But that's probably the kind of scale CSE requires if it's going to grow to a staff of 5,000 or more people and base something like two-thirds of them at the Drake Building.

The graphic below shows the sort of space that might be occupied by a 43,000-square-metre addition if the building were capped at five storeys, the height of the tallest existing pods in the complex.