The federal government agreed March 28 to spend $92.3 million to buy a new head office for Agriculture Canada in Ottawa.
It is a down payment and millions more will have to be spent to upgrade the new building and pay for the move during the next two years.
The two kilometre move from the east side of the Central Experimental Farm to the west side will start this summer when an advanced guard is moved and will finish more than two years from now.
“A small group, between 50 and 300, could move in late summer or autumn,” Lucie Coté from Public Works Canada said in a March 28 interview.
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“The bulk of employees will be moving in late spring 2005.”
The move will for the first time put Agriculture Canada head office staff and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency under the same roof. Departmental officials say that will be more efficient.
But agriculture minister Lyle Vanclief said the move is also because of flaws in the current head offices at the Sir John Carling building.
“It has some structural problems,” he said. “It has some air quality problems, major ones over the last number of years.”
For several years the public works department has been puzzling over what to do with the Agriculture Canada offices. It considered a major renovation or addition at the current site and inserted a request for $57 million in renovation and construction funds into government spending plans submitted to Parliament last week.
However, with the crash of Ottawa’s high technology sector during the past several years, many of the high tech companies have laid off thousands of people and once- bustling buildings have become under-used or empty.
One of those is a large complex beside the Experimental Farm now occupied by Nortel Inc. The shrunken company wants out.
Public Works bid on the building and the deal closed March 28. Nortel employees will have to be out of the building by the fall of 2004.
“Over time, we’ll be able to bring the CFIA and Agriculture and Agri-food Canada and all aspects of the portfolio together,” Vanclief said. “They’re newer buildings, safer buildings and the most economical way to address the problem.”
Pierre Corriveau, director general of asset management for Agriculture Canada, said the move will unite 1,200 people from head office with CFIA staff. The research division will stay in its present building on the eastern edge of the departmental property.
The need for more space for head office staff reflects how the departmental staff has grown.
Before the Sir John Carling building was opened in 1967, Agriculture Canada head office staff occupied one floor in a building on the edge of Parliament Hill, Corriveau said.
