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Neil Malhotra, of Claridge, said company officials are excited about the opportunity to host the gallery and contribute to the city and country.

He said when the government announced a competition between private developers in nine cities to bid for the right to host the gallery, company officials realized they had an opportunity to do something of importance to the city and its citizens.

"We realized having the gallery in Ottawa is something people in this community care about, that it should happen, and that we had a piece of land that is in a perfect location for it," he said. "It's a rare opportunity to do something like this, and I think we will have a very good chance of winning the competition if we can get everything done on time."

The gallery was originally supposed to go into the former United States embassy building on Wellington Street across from the hill, but the Harper government cancelled that project last year, citing escalating costs, then announced the competition.

Ottawa is competing with Vancouver, Halifax, Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary for the right to have the gallery, which is part of Library and Archives Canada.

The move to have a bidding war amongst cities and developers to host the gallery sparked outrage from people who feel it should be in Ottawa along with the rest of the Canada's national institutions. Others feel having a national collection housed in a privately owned building is distasteful and makes the country look bad on the international scene.

The hope is the winning city can be named within the next eight or nine months, with construction of gallery completed by 2011 or 2012 - a decade after the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien first announced it would build the gallery in the reconstituted 1932 Beaux Arts-style building on Wellington. The original construction cost for the refurbishment was $22-million, but by spring, 2006, the overall cost had risen to $45-million, which includes an estimated $11-million that has already spent on design, site preparation and management fees.

Last fall, numerous media reports indicated the Tories had killed the project. However, nothing official was declared and the resultant vacuum was filled with reports that the minority Harper government was considering establishing the gallery as, variously, an online museum, a touring showcase and, finally, as a permanent fixture in the huge EnCana Centre now under construction in downtown Calgary. (The portrait gallery is currently overseen by Library and Archives Canada, a Crown corporation, and its collection stored in a climate-controlled vault in Gatineau, Que.)