MOVE TO FARM ‘ F OR GREATER GOOD OF COMMUNITY,

Former Conservative cabinet minister John Baird, who helped secure Central Experimental Farm land for a new Civic hospital, says in an email exchange this week with the Citizen that he believed moving the hospital to the farm was “for the greater good of our community.”

Baird, who has since left politics, has seldom spoken about his role in helping The Ottawa Hospital to obtain the site it deemed the most appropriate for a new super hospital, on historic research fields across the street from the existing Civic hospital.

That plan has been the subject of growing controversy and criticism, including from Liberal cabinet minister and Ottawa Centre MP Catherine McKenna. This week, chief executive Jack Kitts said the hospital is now revisiting the choice of site and looking at other locations, including one at Tunney’s Pasture and the site of the former Sir John Carling building. It is also planning to explore whether reconfiguring hospital plans on the 60 acres of Experimental Farm land would be less damaging to nearby research experiments.

“We have to find a solution where we have a hospital and a farm, not a hospital or a farm,” Kitts said.

But it was Kitts, or at least the hospital, that went to the regional political minister with the federal government to help leverage the land across the street for a new hospital, Baird said this week.

Six years before the surprise November 2014 announcement by Baird and Kitts that 60 acres of the farm would be transferred to the National Capital Commission and leased by the hospital, an Agriculture Canada official had said the move would never be approved.

It would be like “building a hotel on Parliament Hill,” Michel Falardeau, Agriculture Canada’s director of real estate, had said.

Still, Baird said by email this week that the hospital “asked for my help as regional political minister.”

The federal government, Baird said, is “obviously the biggest land owner in the capital.

“They had identified the best location for a new Civic campus as being the site across the street from the existing hospital.

“I was very pleased to go to work on behalf of the hospital to secure what they needed.”

Baird said he is “just not reasserting myself into the day-to-day political debate.”

He added that his motive at the time “was to help the hospital.”

The November 2014 announce- ment by Kitts and Baird took many people — including researchers whose careers involved long-term experiments on the lands in question — by surprise. Members of the group Friends of the Farm and even Agriculture Canada’s farm advisory committee didn’t find out about the plan to sever farm research land — amounting to just over five per cent of the total land mass, but closer to 15 to 20 per cent of research area — until after it was announced.

Fifteen months later, the land transfer is still not complete and the hospital, which had earlier objected to public consultations until the real estate deal was done, says it will go to the public with an information session in early March.

McKenna said Thursday that she will be there. “I am pleased to be participating in an upcoming public information session hosted by The Ottawa Hospital. It is extremely important to engage with the public about the need for a hospital downtown.”

Dr. Jack Kitts, chief executive at the Civic campus of the Ottawa Hospital, wants to “get it right.” So, in March, 15 full months after the surprise announcement that the Civic planned a new super-hospital on 60 acres of land at the Central Experimental Farm, the community will have its first formal say on the controversial proposal.

The mystery is why it took so long to offer a public feedback session — since this could have avoided some obvious pitfalls and perhaps even produced a compromise everyone could live with. Preventive medicine, as it were.

Instead, the hospital managed to alarm scientists, annoy local politicians and provoke a group of angry citizens who (some of them say) were at first discouraged from airing their view that it was a bad idea to dig up the farmland.

In the nick of time, Kitts has recanted, and now says the Civic will review its plan.

“Those are discussions that have to take place so we don’t have a city that is divided between a farm and a hospital,” he told the Citizen’s Elizabeth Payne. “We should have a city that rallies behind both.”

Other potential hospital venues will be considered, such as the former site of the Sir John Carling building; Tunney’s Pasture (home of Health Canada, a distant cousin in the healing business); and even a reconfigured slice of the Experimental Farm land.

We take no position on where the hospital should be, nor do we question the need: the Civic is a creaky facility and requires replacement. But wouldn’t it have been logical to start by asking stakeholders where they thought a new hospital should go, rather than locking in on location and neglecting due diligence?

Instead, the deal was quietly moved along by Conservative MP John Baird, then political minister for Ottawa, at the behest of the Civic, which, Baird says, didn’t want the public involved until a site was final.

Now the area is represented by a Liberal MP who also happens to be federal environment minister.

One might assume Catherine McKenna would have some sympathy for the warning that important soil research, meant to help us understand climate change, is about to be uprooted. And, indeed, McKenna does want other potential hospital sites considered.

Now discussions will occur among those who should have been talking in the first place. Perhaps the farm and the hospital will find a way to co-exist to everyone’s benefit; perhaps another site will be selected. The community needs its hospital — but the hospital needs community support, too.

That’s what “getting it right” means.