OPERATION DND IS NEAR
Six years after the federal government bought Nortel’s former R&D campus, DND is finally preparing to move in. Citizen reporters James Bagnall and David Pugliese examine one of the largest corporate relocations in Canadian history and explain what it mean
How move to Nortel campus will affect military, region
On a hot August day in Ottawa’s west end, construction crews are banishing the ghosts of Nortel Networks. In what used to be Lab 8 — one of more than a dozen interconnected facilities — skilled tradespeople are busy securing doorways, installing floor-to-ceiling windows, and upgrading the wiring. The soft whirring of power drills echoes throughout the atrium. A layer of dust settles on flooring that’s covered with protective plywood.
It’s a remarkable contrast from the past few years, when Lab 8 — a former hub for wireless R&D — sat mostly silent. There is urgency now. In early November, the Department of National Defence — the largest employer in the national capital region — will begin moving in. By the end of March, the first wave of 3,400 employees is expected to fully occupy Building 8 (as the military now calls it) and three adjacent structures.
Two years after that, if all goes to plan, 8,500 DND employees will have shifted to the 370-acre campus along Carling Avenue from dozens of downtown locations.
Thus will rise a new, state-of-theart DND headquarters — a Pentagon North — that’s expected to spur major change to the culture of the department and to the lives of its employees.
It’s one of the largest corporate moves in Canadian history. It rivals in scale the remaking of downtown Gatineau in the 1970s, when the federal government built the Place du Portage complex to accommodate 10,000 office workers, in large part to spread bureaucracy more evenly across the region. That project forever altered the face of downtown Gatineau and influenced commuting patterns, housing markets and retail throughout the urban core.
Eight years in the making, the new DND headquarters project will reveal much about the ability of the federal government and its contractors to execute large-scale projects.
Although Public Services and Procurement Canada — the department that, along with DND and Shared Services, is overseeing the project — maintains the overall effort is on-time and on-budget, the arrival of the first wave of employees is easily a year behind schedule. It will take superb management and some luck to keep things on track.
The goals for the new headquarters are substantial. DND hopes both to save money and create a tech-savvy workforce that can deal with the security challenges for decades to come.
Senior DND managers believe that having a large number of staff in one location, outfitted with new technologies, will allow them to work more efficiently and effectively.
Certainly the concentration will be heavy at the Carling Campus — the projected staff of 8,500 represents about nine per cent of the DND’s total military and civilian workforce. The world-famous Pentagon — the Washington, D.C.based headquarters for the U.S. military — accommodates 23,000 military and civilian employees, just over one per cent of its total.
The Carling site, like the Pentagon, will also promote a military environment, quite different from the current headquarters at 101 Colonel By Dr. A Hall of Honour will be dedicated to preserve military history and heritage, and military artifacts will be displayed indoors and on the grounds. The Kandahar Cenotaph, which honours those killed in Afghanistan, will find a new home there.
Employees won’t need to leave the Carling site. Services will include retail and food outlets, dental and physiotherapy offices, a pharmacy, a postal outlet and two fitness centres.
The plan is clear enough. Now, it’s just a matter of how to realize it. After all, it’s been a long time coming.
The headquarters for Canada’s military has long been a dominant feature of the city’s core, a few minutes’ stroll from Parliament.
To accommodate the war effort in the 1940s, the government erected a series of four-storey structures on the site of the presentday courthouse on Elgin Street. Though designated “temporary,” the buildings served as the home for Canadian Forces headquarters until the early 1970s.
Two matters of great consequence occurred in 1972. The Liberal government of prime minister Pierre Trudeau profoundly reorganized the department, eliminating overlap between its civilian and military parts and forcing them to operate as a single entity. Civilians were given a greater role in creating defence policy.
Coincidentally, construction that year was nearing completion on a major office complex at 101 Colonel By Drive, just to the east, along the Rideau Canal. The edifice would become the head office for the newly unified Department of National Defence. By 1974, there were 4,000 employees who had moved in, representing about half DND’s headquarters staff.
The towers at Colonel By Drive were originally to have been occupied by the Transport Department, which may explain why they give off scarcely a whiff of military purpose. It also reveals why DND — a vastly bigger department — from the beginning lacked space for its legions of bureaucrats and military planners.
To accommodate the overflow, the government leased dozens of smaller facilities throughout the downtown. Elements of the air force wound up at 400 Cumberland St., the director of military pay took up residence at 305 Rideau St., and the chief of military personnel decamped to Coventry Road. Today, there are 16,000 DND employees spread across 40 facilities.
The arrangement is hugely inefficient. DND is spending many millions of dollars extra each year to duplicate physical security and other types of administrative overhead at each of its facilities.
Though everyone knew this was a waste of taxpayers’ money, a plan to rectify things didn’t emerge until after 2006 — when a new Conservative government arrived in Ottawa promising to provide “value for taxpayers’ money.”
At DND, this took the form of an “accommodation strategy” that, done properly, could save a small fortune every year by taking advantage of economies of scale. In 2008, DND and Public Services methodically began considering options: What was the best way to consolidate DND office space? Which leases should be terminated? What properties were coming available?
At the time, Nortel was very much alive — a US$10.4-billion-ayear corporation with 30,000 employees. Close to 6,000 worked in Canada, the lion’s share on Ottawa’s Carling campus. They had little idea their world was about to collapse.
The global financial crisis ripped through the economy in the fall of 2008, sapping Nortel’s strength with surprising speed. The company filed for protection from its creditors in January 2009 — then it prepared to auction off its assets.
DND and Public Services knew the Carling campus would eventually come up for sale. Public Services bought the campus for $208 million in December.
It was understood from the beginning that DND would occupy the property, according to Daniel Godbout, the Defence Department’s director general of the Headquarters Transformation project.
Nevertheless, it was also clear from the terms of the sale that the move wouldn’t take place anytime soon. Former Nortel employees working for other firms such as Ericsson would be permitted to remain on site for another three years under extended leases.
It turned out DND and Public Services would need all that time and more to figure out how to relocate so many employees.
It wasn’t just a matter of refurbishing the site and sorting out the logistics of the move. DND didn’t have a good handle on how its employees would be affected.
Shortly after the government purchased the Carling campus, then deputy minister Robert Fonberg and chief of the defence staff Gen. Walt Natynczyk prepared a message to employees — ultimately never sent — that outlined what workers would face with the relocation.
“A move of this magnitude will, no doubt, cause some disruptions along the way,” pointed out the message, obtained by the Citizen through access-to-information law.