GOVERNMENT WILL PAY $11.8M TO CLEAN NEW CIVIC SITE, BUT LEASE PROPERTY
The federal government will pay $11.8 million to clean up poisoned soil on the Carling Avenue property it’s leasing to the Ottawa Hospital for a new Civic campus, Liberal MP Steven MacKinnon said Friday.
That’s part of a 99-year agreement for a site at the northeast corner of the Central Experimental Farm, near Dow’s Lake, where Agriculture Canada’s Sir John Carling Building used to be. MacKinnon is the member of Parliament for Gatineau and parliamentary secretary to Carla Qualtrough, the minister of public services and procurement. Her department is the land’s custodian.
Although bureaucrats at the ceremonial signing of the agreement at city hall promised publicly to release the full agreement, they reneged by phone afterward. After I threw an undignified fit, the public-services department shared the main text of the lease but kept back 17 annexes.
The department promised to make the annexes public next week. The titles suggest they describe how the hospital is to relate to the neighbouring farm, how multi-use paths on the site are to be kept and improved and where a hospital parking lot will go.
Much of the main text is boilerplate: Any archeological finds belong to the federal government, for instance, and the hospital is forbidden to bring hazardous materials onto the property except for hospital uses. If the hospital vacates the land, the feds get it back.
The lease covers 20 hectares (the exact description of which is in one of the unreleased annexes), lasts 99 years for $1 a year and requires the hospital to provide 207 parking spaces for visitors to Dow’s Lake in exchange for getting to use land that now has a surface parking lot on it.
The hospital can be forced to keep the parking even if it has to do so at a loss, the lease says.
The federal government will also tear down the Sir John Carling Building ’s old cafeteria, which was preserved in the 2014 demolition for its heritage value. One unreleased annex is a “character statement,” an assessment that presumably concludes it isn’t worth saving.
The project has been bogged down in selecting a site for years. The hospital wanted a piece of the Central Experimental Farm across from its current location a little west on Carling Avenue, the National Capital Commission recommended a site at Tunney’s Pasture, and politicians finally dictated a compromise on the Sir John Carling property. Which is known to be toxic.
Dynamiting the Sir John Carling Building in 2014 left acidic phenol in the rubble used to fill in the basement and cement dust is also potentially dangerous. The site’s been the target of cleanup orders from the federal environment ministry, once contaminated goo was spotted running into the Rideau Canal from a large drainpipe that used to carry rain and snowmelt away from the office tower.
Last March, the public-services department estimated the cost of decontaminating the property at more than $11 million: carting away the toxic rubble would cost about $8.5 million and treating groundwater another $2.5 million. Doing something with the building ’s old cafeteria, which was preserved in the demolition, wasn’t included in the estimate. Ordinary environmental costs associated with construction aren’t included in the federal government’s contribution, MacKinnon said: they’ll be the hospital’s problem.
(The lease does not contain the $11.8-million figure. An unreleased annex is titled “Class D Estimation,” which suggests it includes the price of something.)
“This lease agreement is the first step in bringing a new worldclass health centre to Ottawa,” Mayor Jim Watson said, before Ottawa Centre MP Catherine McKenna and Ottawa Hospital board chair Katherine Cotton signed a one-page prop version of the agreement. He jokingly handed McKenna a loonie in payment of the first year’s rent.
“We’ll put it to good use,” MacKinnon told Watson as the environment minister took the coin.
The mayor promised that when city council approves a rezoning to allow the hospital construction, it’ll restrict the uses to institutional ones. A version of the proposed zoning includes sections of “mixed-use” land, which could theoretically include condominium and office towers. That prompted a news conference a few weeks ago by former city councillor Clive Doucet and other activists, demanding a public inquiry into the possibility that the whole hospital agreement is a development deal to make private profit on public property.
A section of the lease forbids the hospital to construct any standalone commercial building.
“The government of Canada is committed to ensuring that the cultural significance of the Experimental Farm is not compromised,” McKenna said at the ceremonial signing.
Planning for a new hospital to replace the century-old Civic campus is still in the early stages. The current thinking is that the new Civic will be a somewhat smaller, higher-end facility that provides the most advanced and cutting-edge treatments and pushes more routine care to other institutions — more transplants, fewer appendectomies. With a $3-million grant from the provincial government, the Ottawa Hospital has worked up a design concept it revealed in January, but getting to the point of submitting a formal request for funding for the roughly $2-billion project will take another three or four years.
Coun. Riley Brockington, who represents the newly leased land, has been trying to lock into the lease conditions that would preserve as many of the existing buildings on the property as possible, such as the domed building that used to hold the Dominion Observatory. He wasn’t invited to the signing, he said. Nor were Jeff Leiper, Catherine McKenney, or David Chernushenko, whose wards all converge within a block of the site, in attendance.