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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, Coun. 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.

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“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.