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The Conservative government fired back at the Liberals on Thursday for advocating a new site for the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, as the head of the team that designed it disclosed that it has substantially downsized the controversial memorial.

Voytek Gorczynski, the head of ABSTRAKT Studio Architecture in Toronto, said he and his team are “reducing some of the elements” of the memorial as they refine the design.

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The memorial will now occupy about half the 5,000-square-metre site on Wellington Street between the Supreme Court of Canada and Library and Archives Canada, Gorczynski said in an interview. It had previously filled about 60 per cent of the site, he said.

The memorial consists of two main elements. One is a series of parallel concrete folds, rising above 14 metres at their tallest point, covered with 100 million “memory squares” representing lives lost to communist regimes worldwide. The other, called the Bridge of Hope, is a large, triangular viewing platform.