The decision of Stephen Harper's Conservative government to cancel the National Portrait Gallery was a smart move to get out of a poorly conceived plan to build the museum as a public-private partnership, says former Liberal heritage minister Sheila Copps.

"I think that was a bit of a way of getting themselves out of a pickle that they'd created," Copps said Saturday. Heritage Minister James Moore announced on Friday that the gallery would be cancelled.

Moore said none of the proposals submitted by developers in a nationwide competition was acceptable and the government must act prudently in a time of economic instability.

But Copps said she didn't buy that excuse.

She described the competition as "poorly thought-out" and a "no-win" political situation that would pit the losing cities against the government.

Copps first announced the creation of the gallery as a wholly government-funded Ottawa museum in 2001 under Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. The gallery was to display portraits of influential and ordinary Canadians kept in storage at a facility run by Library and Archives Canada in Gatineau.

Originally, the gallery was to be housed in the former American embassy on Wellington Street, across the street from Parliament Hill.

Copps predicted that within a few months, the government would decide that the portraits needed a home and would eventually wind up in the former embassy.

Ottawa NDP MP Paul Dewar, who lobbied hard to keep the gallery in the nation's capital, said he thinks the cancellation of the public-private partnership plan shows the idea was "a dud from the beginning," and he too was optimistic about what it meant for the gallery's future.

"Hopefully this is the beginning of common sense prevailing and hopefully what we're going to see is this is the first step to have the portrait gallery in Ottawa where it belongs."

In 2006, Harper's Conservative government reviewed the portrait gallery project after it was delayed and the estimated cost ballooned from $22 million to $45 million.

It announced in November 2007 that it wanted the museum to be a public-private partnership and was inviting nine cities across Canada to compete for the gallery.

Edmonton and Calgary were among the three finalists, with Ottawa, in bidding for a National Portrait Gallery.

Alberta's Minister of Culture Lindsay Blackett said the news that the bids were deemed unacceptable was a shock to him.

"I don't understand why, when the money's there, that the government would say we're going to close it," he told CBC News. "The provincial government and private sector were going bear the cost. Really all the federal government had to do was incur the cost of shipping the artifacts to Alberta."

Blackett said he'll be contacting the heritage minister to find out more about this decision and if anything can be done to change it.