The Chair of the Board of Governors of the Ottawa Hospital says Environment Minister and Ottawa Centre MP Catherine McKenna asked the Hospital to consider Tunney’s Pasture as a possible site for the new Civic Campus.
Last Thursday’s decision by the NCC came as a surprise to some, and was soundly rejected Tuesday in a statement by the Hospital’s Board of Governors.
Appearing on CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Evan Solomon just hours after the decision last week, McKenna said she had nothing to do with it.
“This process, which was independent, I was not involved at all, was led by the NCC and I think they came to a very good decision,” McKenna said. “[Tunney’s Pasture] was one of the sites put forward by the Ottawa Hospital and the NCC looked at the criteria.”
But on Tuesday, Hospital Board Chair James McCracken told Solomon McKenna had spoken with the Hospital a year before, specifically about Tunney’s Pasture.
“About a year ago, we were asked to consider [Tunney’s Pasture] as an option when this whole process started to take place again,” McCracken said. “I had a meeting with Minister McKenna last year, with Doctor [Jack] Kitts, the CEO of the Hospital, and that was the point at which she asked us to consider that with the other sites we were recommending. She had indicated that it was probably one of the sites that we should look at, and we made the agreement that we would go back and look at that with the other sites that we had already discussed, so that was as far as it went, and we submitted a report on the four sites to the NCC, along with our previous reports.”
“Since then, I have not had a conversation with Catherine McKenna,” McCracken says.
McCracken said he has no idea how the NCC came to its decision on recommending Tunney’s Pasture. “I’m certainly not into pointing fingers at any one particular person,” he says. “There was a process the NCC followed and I have to assume it was a transparent process.”
Carleton Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre had told Evan Solomon last Thursday he thought “the Liberal Cabinet had been in the driver’s seat” on the decision “from the very beginning” after reopening the process to choose a site for the new Civic Campus. It’s something McKenna said was “completely false.”