For most of the past two years, the commercial pad at the entrance to Three Sisters Mountain Village was mostly a construction site with a sign promising what was coming. If you lived in Stewart Creek or anywhere else on this side of the highway and needed groceries, you drove past it toward the opposite end of town, where Save-on-Foods and Safeway have sat for years. That's not a complaint about either store. It's just geography: both of Canmore's large grocery chains have always been clustered at the far end of the community from Three Sisters.
This year that geography changed, and it changed in a specific order that tells you something about how a commercial strip actually gets built, one tenant at a time, in whatever sequence the permits and the leases allow.
The Order Things Actually Opened In
The Gateway at Three Sisters didn't open as a finished shopping center. It filled in over about twelve months, and the order matters if you're trying to figure out what you could actually get done there at any given point.
- September 2025 — Dollarama opened, the first location of the chain in the Canmore area.
- December 18, 2025 — PetValu opened, after being announced as a tenant that October.
- February 2026 — A Sobeys Liquor store opened on site.
- April 16, 2026 — IGA opened its doors at 9 a.m., a 22,000-square-foot store at 300 Cascade Drive, run by Sobeys Capital Incorporated.
That's a year and a half between the first tenant and the anchor grocery store. If you moved to Three Sisters in the fall of 2025, you had a dollar store and, by December, a pet supply shop within a few minutes of home, but you were still driving across town for milk and produce until the following April.
What's Still Filling In
The grocery anchor landing didn't end the build-out. Three more tenants signed on this year and were targeting a late-summer opening: Ascent Dental, Firehouse Subs, and a second location of Beamer's Coffee Bar, the Canmore original that's been pouring coffee since 1994 and has run its downtown shop on 7th Avenue since 2003. As of early August, Three Sisters Mountain Village's own updates confirmed IGA, Sobeys Liquor, Dollarama, and PetValu were open, with Firehouse and Beamer's still listed as opening soon. If they haven't flipped the lights on yet, they're close enough that this fall is the season to check before you drive back to your old spot.
Even once those three are running, the site isn't finished. The Gateway's own plans describe 290,000 square feet of mixed-use space, and pieces of that, including restaurant space, office space, and a gas station, are still under construction. What's open right now is the errand-run layer: groceries, liquor, pet food, a dollar store, and soon coffee and a sub shop. The sit-down dining and the fuel pump are still to come.
Why the Coffee Shop Took Longer Than the Dollar Store
If you're wondering why a business as small as a dollar store beat a full grocery anchor to the site by seven months, it comes down to what each one needed before it could open. IGA was announced as the Gateway's grocery retailer back in June 2024, but the store itself couldn't move until the development permit for that specific building was approved, which is a longer runway than a standalone retail unit needs. Smaller-format tenants like Dollarama and PetValu could occupy finished retail space as soon as it was ready, without waiting on the anchor's own permit and construction timeline. That's the practical reason the sequence ran small-format retail first, then liquor, then the grocery store last among this wave, rather than the more familiar pattern of a grocery anchor opening first and smaller shops filling in around it.
The Gateway Is a Piece of Something Larger
The Gateway sits in the Stewart Creek pocket of Three Sisters Mountain Village, and it's built to serve more than the neighborhood that exists today. Three Sisters Mountain Village's own materials describe the Gateway as the future shopping destination not just for Stewart Creek but for the Three Sisters Village and Smith Creek areas that are still being built out in phases over the coming years. In other words, the commercial hub that just closed the loop on your grocery run this spring was sized for a population that doesn't fully live here yet.
That's worth knowing if you've watched the construction traffic on Three Sisters Parkway and wondered whether the retail buildout was proportional to what's already built. It isn't, not yet. The Gateway was planned around where Three Sisters Mountain Village is headed over the next several years, which is why it has more square footage in the pipeline than what's currently occupied.
What This Actually Changes on a Tuesday
None of this rewrites where anyone lives or what their commute looks like. What it changes is the shape of an ordinary week. A year ago, a coffee run, a grocery trip, and a dog food pickup meant three separate stops on the far side of Canmore, or one longer trip strung together with a drive across town in between. As of this fall, assuming Firehouse and Beamer's have opened on schedule, all five of those errands, coffee, subs, groceries, liquor, and pet food, sit within the same few minutes of Three Sisters Parkway.
The Gateway isn't a destination the way downtown Canmore's Main Street is. Nobody's driving from the other side of town to visit a Dollarama or an IGA. But for the people who already live on this side of the highway, it's the first fall where the full errand loop closes without leaving the neighborhood, and that's a small, specific, useful thing that wasn't true even six months ago.
If you're curious how the rest of the Gateway's build-out lines up with what's planned for Three Sisters Village and Smith Creek in the years ahead, or what any of this means for a property you're watching in the area, Vincent & Wright Group knows this stretch of Three Sisters Mountain Village block by block and can walk you through what's actually built versus what's still on paper.
