Reevely: Councillor demands protection for Experimental Farm in Ottawa Hospital rebuilding plans

Amputating 60 acres of the Experimental Farm would wipe out a decades-long soil research project and reduce overall research land by 15 per cent. Photo Illustration: Robert Cross, Ottawa Citizen

Thursday, January 14, 2016

OTTAWA CITIZEN, By Dave Reevely

Having given up hope that the Ottawa Hospital will talk to its neighbours about its plans to rebuild its Civic campus on the Experimental Farm, Councillor Riley Brockington is pressing the federal government to stop carving up the property.

Even the city has designs on some of the precious land, he says.

“I’m not looking for national-park status, because this is a national research-slash-agricultural station,” says the River councillor, whose ward includes the farm. “But it needs some form of protection.”

He brought it up with the new Liberal MP for Ottawa Centre, Catherine McKenna, who whipped through City Hall this week for meetings with the local councillors in her riding, and says he won’t let it go.

The problem isn’t the hospital’s plan to rebuild. “It’s very difficult to argue against the necessity of a hospital,” Brockington says. The current Civic has been added to and renovated so many times it’s like Frankenstein’s monster. The problem is nobody’s debated the wisdom of carving off 60 acres of the Experimental Farm or what will happen in Carlington and the Civic Hospital neighbourhood when their defining institution changes radically.

Consultations are coming, the hospital promises. The hospital has hired a company to run public events — Pace Consulting, which the city itself has often used on big complicated projects — and hopes to announce dates very soon, says spokeswoman Kate Eggins.

Brockington is worried that it’ll mix up consultations the hospital has to hold about its plans for medical services, held across the territory it serves in Eastern Ontario, with ones that should deal with how a new hospital will fit into a city neighbourhood.

“I have not received clear or prompt information from the Ottawa Hospital on the timelines to host a very basic information session, intended for the immediate community that abuts the Civic Hospital,” Brockington wrote to hospital chief executive Jack Kitts last week. “The chronic delays have been unfortunate and undermine the Civic’s credibility.”

I don’t think you’re serious, the councillor wrote: “I am convinced there is no genuine attempt or plan to host a community information session.”

We will hold such a session, Kitts promised in response. We really will.

Brockington points out that mall company RioCan is planning a major redevelopment of its Westgate shopping centre nearby and had no trouble presenting its early vision in a community meeting just before Christmas. He’s been waiting for the hospital for over a year.

RioCan needs the city’s approval and co-operation. As a provincial institution, the hospital can just about do what it pleases.

“If that’s the way they’re looking at it, we have a much bigger problem with the Ottawa Hospital than just one site,” Brockington says.

(One way around such things is to build a new hospital in the middle of nowhere. That’s what they’re doing in Windsor, buying an ordinary farm field on a concession line out beyond the city’s airport because it’s cheap and easy to build on. Also not great.)

The Ottawa Hospital’s plans probably won’t be stopped outright at this point. But they can be a warning about slicing away at the farm’s property.

“We keep eroding, chipping away here and there,” Brockington says. The federal government scoffed when the hospital said it wanted a piece of the farm, then one day it said “OK, sure.” If it happened once, it can happen again.

The western tip of the farm got lopped off years ago and sold for what’s now the Central Park neighbourhood west of Merivale Road. The hospital is set to get its 60 acres off Carling. The city is eyeing a 10-metre strip of the farm along Baseline Road for a busway it wants to build by 2031. There’s perennial talk of putting in a botanical garden; Brockington figures that’s more in keeping with the farm and its arboretum, but there are no standards for any proposal to meet.

Brockington had started talking to former MP Paul Dewar about it, but they hadn’t made much progress and then came the election and Dewar lost his seat. Now Brockington’s starting over with McKenna.

Perhaps the Experimental Farm shouldn’t be inviolate, but there should be rules for using it beyond a powerful politician’s whim. McKenna has the advantage of being a minister rather than an opposition critic and can get it done.