OTTAWA - Grand plans for a gleaming new science museum, with cutting-edge technologies showcasing Canadian innovations, have come crashing down to earth.

Federal museum officials are now being told to consider wedging the museum inside an abandoned paper factory dating from the 1800s.

It's a dramatic retreat from the bold $800-million facility that was supposed to rise from an empty tract of land just west of Parliament Hill, in blueprints drawn up less than 10 years ago.

That plan was quickly killed by the incoming Conservative government.

Documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show officials have already begun surveying the old E.B. Eddy Co. factory in nearby Gatineau, Que., for a dramatically scaled down facility.

"Over all, the site seems to meet the needs of the new (museum)," the $5,000 preliminary survey found.

"It echoes the corporate theme of past, present and future and it is minutes from downtown. There are some buildings on the site that date back to the 1800s and can not be removed for heritage purposes. They appear to meet the needs of the new facility and could be used for interpretative purposes."

The historic E.B. Eddy plant was closed in 2007 by Montreal-based pulp-and-paper giant Domtar Inc., the last of a half-dozen mills along the Ottawa River that churned out lumber, paper and pulp.

The survey determined the site on the north shore is large enough to accommodate the historic science collections, though other studies are still required, including a check into aboriginal claims on the land.

The collections are currently located in a shabby industrial park far from the downtown core, inside a bakery warehouse the federal government bought in 1967 from a distressed firm.

The location was intended to be temporary, but 43 years later the Canada Science and Technology Museum remains a national orphan.

Officials have watched jealously as the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the National Art Gallery, the National Aviation Museum, the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Museum of Nature have each been showered with taxpayer dollars for new or refurbished digs over the last 25 years.

Plans for a National Portrait Gallery may have been scuttled by the Conservative government but the collection never had its own building, unlike the massive science collection, most of which sits in facilities poorly adapted for preserving and presenting artifacts.

The science museum has been promised no money for the E.B. Eddy site, still owned by Domtar, but its board of trustees nevertheless has set July 17, 2017, as the opening date for a new facility -- somewhere.

That would mark Canada's 150 birthday, and a half-century of family-friendly exhibits stuck "temporarily" in the old bakery.

A spokesman for the cash-strapped museum says no more studies will be ordered for the E.B. Eddy site until politicians give the green light.

"We are waiting for government decisions, and National Capital Commission decisions, on how they want to proceed with this initiative ... before we actually expend significantly more money for any kind of one-site study," says Yves St-Onge, vice-president of public affairs and marketing.

A Conservative MP who represents an Ottawa riding is dead set against the E.B. Eddy site. Royal Galipeau is pressing for a newly constructed showcase facility near the aviation museum, where the decommissioning of a military air base has released land.

"We should have a science campus in that neck of the woods," says Galipeau, adding that the museum would be housed near other science-oriented facilities such as the National Research Council.

He has joined another Ottawa MP, Liberal Mauril Belanger, in lobbying for a brand new structure at the air base site.

"We need to have a design-built museum of science and technology for this country," Belanger says. "And I hope it would not be an old building that we refurbish. I think it needs to be a new building."

But both politicians agree that with the government newly mired in deficits, any new home for the science museum is still a long way off.

"They're going to have a lot of time to look at a lot of options," says Galipeau.

The museum, meanwhile, remains cash-strapped.

Last December, the board of trustees was forced to cut 14.5 positions and trim operating costs by $1 million -- though the federal government eventually chipped in with a one-time grant of $3.7 million in the March budget.

The current facility displays just two per cent of the 40,000 artifacts in the collection, most of which are stuck in nearby rented warehouses. The museum is considering building a new storage facility on its expansive front lawn to consolidate the stored collection and offer retail and other space for rent.

Estimates of the cost of building a new museum range up to $300 million.