Public hospitals shouldn't be named for private individuals - no matter how generous
Universal health care in Canada, a precious principle, means equality of service, and equality of loss. Which isn’t greater or lesser because of a family’s riches.

thestar.com
By Rosie DiManno
Feb. 2, 2017

On hot summer nights, when I was a little girl, my parents would spread out a blanket beneath some trees in the park across the street. That was our blue-collar AC, more cooling than fans distributed around a house where humidity soaked the walls.

It’s among my most vivid memories of long ago childhood, the three of us stretched out beneath the stars, me lying between them, listening to their soft conversation and drifting off to sleep. In the morning, I’d wake up in my own bed with no memory of how I got back there. Oh for the days of uninterrupted dreams.

I hope to place a commemorative bench on that spot, with a plaque in memory of my late father. The application process seems simple enough and the cost reasonable: $2,530, according to the Toronto Parks and Recreation website.

After my father died, my therapist reminded that, as long as there are people around who still remember, the deceased live on, in a way. Perhaps future generations will wonder about the name on the plaque but mostly I’d like to provide a place, in a park which has no particular significance and only a couple of benches, for people to sit and feed the birds or watch kids play or just rest and reflect.

So I well understand the desire to hallow a life, a love, by means big or small - as the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built an architectural marvel, the Taj Mahal, to his favourite wife, as the Princes William and Harry last week announced they are commissioning a statue in memory of Princess Diana for the gardens at Kensington Palace.

My out-of-pocket expense would be relatively small. If I were a billionaire philanthropist, I might very well wish to immortalize my dad’s name on an academic building - for a man who never went beyond fifth grade - or a medical wing. Well, not a medical wing because my experience with hospitals in those dreadful months of his illness was horrible.

The Garron family is extraordinarily generous; indeed, their $50 million gift to Toronto East General Hospital just over a year ago was historic in scope. And that came on top of the $30 million which Myron and Berna Garron had earlier bestowed on the Hospital for Sick Children, establishing the Garron Family Cancer Centre at the renowned institution.

While the Garrons were not mentioned by name, it’s believed their contributions to this city’s health care - and the branding consequences - were front of mind in, as the Star’s Robert Benzie reported Wednesday, a Queen’s Park proposal that would ban hospitals from being renamed at the behest of rich donors.

Toronto East General’s main site was renamed some 13 months ago the Michael Garron Hospital, in memory of the couple’s oldest son who died, age 13, in 1975, from a rare soft tissue cancer. As Berna Garron told reporters, Michael, knowing that his time was running out, had confessed his biggest fear was to be forgotten. They assured him this wouldn’t happen, not so long as they drew breath. Their avowal to a beloved dying boy eventually took shape in bountiful philanthropy. Michael Garron had been born at East General.

I’ve pulled the statement released by East General’s president and CEO. “To recognize the enormity of this donation, we will rename ourselves the Toronto East Health Network and recognize this transformational gift by calling our main site the Michael Garron Hospital.” Adding: “This is a defining moment for our hospital and East Toronto. This investment in equipment and talent will allow us to continue delivering outstanding care to our diverse community.”

Nobody, far as I can tell, expressed any objection to the renaming at the time.

Yet, who gets to define?

Because you have a great deal of money and a beneficent heart - and a hole of loss that can’t ever be filled - is that sufficient justification for laying nomenclature ownership to a public hospital?

With no disrespect intended for the Garrons, I don’t think so.

Universal health care in Canada, a precious principle, means equality of service. And, I maintain, equality of loss. Which isn’t greater or lesser because of a family’s riches, nor even the prominence of an individual they wish to memorialize. We are well beyond the Family Compact era when the privileged and the powerful could slap their names on churches and parks and universities.

There’s no indication in the media archives that the Garrons insisted on recasting the facility as the Michael Garron Hospital as a condition of their gift. If it was at the hospital board’s suggestion, it was gratitude misapplied.

It’s common practice to name or rename public spaces, building and roads and infrastructure, after historical figures, politicians and royalty and towering international legends such as Nelson Mandela. But a private individual, elevated to the same distinction, has an odour of entitlement with dollar signs attached. Just like the rich used to buy indulgences from the Pope.

Under the draft copy circulated internally by Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins, any new hospital name “must not include the corporate or business name of a corporate donor, or the family name of an individual or family donor, (or) the family name of an individual.

The directive would not apply to hospital wings, individual buildings on campus, research centres, treatment facilities or health service programs. Surely that’s more than enough to choose from while leaving hospitals alone so they can reflect, instead, their geographic location, their history, mandate and “the culture or heritage of the persons served by the hospital.”

While it’s hard to imagine a corporation such as Coca-Cola buying its way onto a hospital’s edifice, I would once have said the same thing about a sports stadium that wasn’t built by Air Canada or Rogers (or an out-size statue of Ted Rogers out front).

As Benzie reported, the Ontario Hospital Association has warned that the government’s proposal might “trigger a freeze on large-scale philanthropic efforts.”

If that’s what it takes to nudge one’s philanthropic heart - a family’s name in neon perpetuity atop a hospital - then keep your money.

Or, like me, buy a sweet little bench as a remembrance of things past rather than bequeathing extravagant heraldry.