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The National Holocaust Memorial, one of the Conservative government’s signature new monuments in Ottawa, is badly behind schedule and now won’t officially open until spring 2017 — a year later than planned.

The monument, to be built at Booth and Wellington streets opposite the Canadian War Museum, will be the largest and most complex monument created in the capital since the National War Memorial in 1939.

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The original timetable called for construction to start last March, with completion in December and an inauguration ceremony on May 4, 2016 — Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial Day.

But the project ground to a halt when bids from pre-qualified firms for the construction contract came in well above budget, said Margi Oksner, executive director of the National Holocaust Monument Development Council, created in 2011 to raise money for the project.

“We weren’t sure what caused that,” Oksner said. “We were all surprised by it. None of us felt that our original estimates were loopy.”