Civic Hospital expansion location botched

By Stu Averill

In Kelly Egan’s column of July 10 in the Ottawa Citizen, he asked, “Have we botched the location of the (Civic) Hospital?” His question was, of course, rhetorical, as illustrated by the flood of concurring letters to both the Citizen and local newspapers like the Glebe Report.

As Egan explained, the 2017 recommendation to build on the hillside overlooking Dow’s Lake – a lush, construction-challenging, cost-inflating site – instead of expanding the hospital on the 60-acre Central Experimental Farm site directly across Carling Avenue from the current Civic campus – a previously agreed upon, level site with no trees – was mostly political. The latter site might have allowed construction of a parking garage on either side of Carling Avenue to serve both the old and new hospitals without any environmental destruction. As well, much of the 60-acre site may never have been needed for hospital expansion if some new buildings were constructed on the old site as older buildings were decommissioned and demolished.

Significant public support for rejecting the 60-acre site came from a group of citizens who were opposed to development of any part of the Farm for any reason. It was claimed that the 60 acres were being used for ongoing agricultural research which would be disrupted and its value lost if the land were developed.

But I undertook to study this question. I visited the Farm regularly starting in 2019 to monitor usage of the 60-acre site and asked the Farm about their practices. Astonishingly, I found that only 10 acres on the west side of Ash Lane are being used as research plots. The other 50 acres are comprised of larger fields farmed in the same manner as other fields, including for cattle feed, and thus are not essential to the Farm’s research mandate. Clearly, usage of the farm fields was misrepresented when the hospital site was being chosen, thereby steering the choice toward the Dow’s Lake site.

Nor was information volunteered on the chemically intensive farming practices employed on the Farm, further biasing the selection process. Had the citizens of Ottawa been informed that the fouling of Dow’s Lake is probably due to the use of chemical fertilizers on the Farm and that the fields are routinely sprayed with herbicides that are prohibited along Carling Avenue, would there have been any public resistance to using a small part of the Farm to build a hospital? Those protesting use of any part of the Farm for a hospital were duped by a classic bait-and-switch scheme, with the alternate site changed from Tunney’s Pasture or a similar industrial site to a much more environmentally sensitive part of the very Farm that they were trying to protect.

In summary, in addition to the recommendation to move the Civic Hospital to Dow’s Lake being senseless logistically, environmentally and financially, and being ruinous to a prominent Ottawa landscape, support for the recommendation was garnered by deceiving the public about the use of the originally proffered treeless Farm fields across from the present hospital. Yet Mayor Jim Watson and his puppet council recently gave final approval to the Dow’s Lake site, despite having just declared a climate emergency in the city. Of course, with Watson influencing both the recommendation and approval processes, approval was just as assured as the outcome of a Russian election!

There are times when a decision made by our elected representatives is so blatantly flawed that it is indefensible and should be reversed. Should we, the citizens of Ottawa, simply accept Council’s thoughtless approval of the Dow’s Lake site and stand idly by while this landmark is erased from the landscape forever? Or should we uphold our duty to both future generations and the environment, stand shoulder-to-shoulder and stop the bulldozers? Will you join us, Ms. McKenna? Premier Ford?

Stuart Averill is a registered professional geoscientist who grew up on a mixed farm in Manitoba. He lives within walking distance of Dow’s Lake and the Experimental Farm.