The statement appears in a Feb. 10, 2015, email from Mills to NCC chief executive Mark Kristmanson, included in 215 pages of documents released under access to information that provide a rare glimpse of the private views of the memorial by Mills and other NCC officials.

In the email, Mills recounts that cabinet ministers Jason Kenney and Chris Alexander made a funding announcement at what was described as the monument’s site in August 2013.

Prior to that, the only site that had been publicly identified for the memorial was at the Garden of the Provinces, further west on Wellington Street.

The press conference took place three months before the NCC board voted unanimously to amend the permitted land use to allow the property — owned by Public Works and Government Services Canada and until then reserved for a future Federal Court of Canada building — to be used for the memorial.

“There was really no choice but to approve what had already been announced,” Mills says in the email to Kristmanson.

“If the NCC board had voted against the site, we would not only have been straying onto the turf of the Public Works department, we would have embarrassed the government in a significant way,” his email says.

While the National Capital Act says the NCC must approve changes to the use of public lands and new “buildings or other work” erected on them, it also gives the federal cabinet the power to give approval if the NCC balks.