Brampton scores new hospital in Ford government budget

Torontosun.com
March 24, 2021

Brampton is finally going to get the new hospital the city so desperately needs, part of an announcement that will be in the Ford government’s budget being tabled on Wednesday afternoon.

The project has been years in the making and will, once opened, give Brampton a level of care on par with the rest of the province.

All that said, Brampton residents may not want to pop the champagne just yet, hospitals can take a long time to build. The Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital opened in February 2021 but was announced by the McGuinty government in 2007.

The news for Brampton is good; it’s just going to take a long time to get there.

Neither provincial nor municipal leaders from Brampton responded to requests for comment on the news which has been confirmed by multiple sources.

Brampton has waged a long and hard campaign to get to this point, continually pointing out to governments that it has fewer hospital beds than other communities across the province. The city has highlighted that there are just 0.9 hospital beds per 1,000 residents in Brampton compared to an Ontario average of 2.3 beds per 1,000 residents.

As part of their Fair Deal for Brampton campaign, the city underscored the inadequacies of the current system. Brampton Civic Hospital, part of the William Osler Network, was built to handle 90,000 emergency-room visits a year but currently handles 130,000.

The hospital is actually fairly new, built in 2007, after being approved in 2002 by the former PC government, but it replaced another facility that closed.

Despite explosive growth, Brampton has not seen an expansion of hospital beds. In many ways, the city has been ground zero for “hallway healthcare,” something Premier Doug Ford said he would end as premier.

I’ll cut the government some slack on this front given that they’ve spent the last year dealing with the pandemic, but they can’t go into the next election without having some movement on this front, not if they want to have the public believe they are serious.

This will be the biggest hospital announcement of the Ford government’s mandate. So far, they have announced smaller hospitals in West Lincoln and Picton, but nothing major like this.

While Ford was present for the opening of the Cortellucci Vaughan Hospital, that was a Liberal government project. He has agreed to continue on with projects approved by the Liberals in Niagara, Windsor and Ottawa but those, too, are more on the replacement side, not new hospitals.

Ottawa in particular could use something in the sprawling eastern suburbs anchored by Orleans. While the province has agreed to build a new civic campus in the core, the east end of the city is wanting.

Article contentAs are places such as London where reports of patients being placed in broom closets helped feed the narrative of hallway health care that Doug Ford used to seal his victory in the last election.

Budgets are about choices; governing is about choices. Right now, the Ford government remains mired in dealing with COVID and that is unlikely to change for the next several months. That doesn’t mean they can’t move forward on projects such as this.

A new hospital in Brampton is urgently needed and no community is more deserving. Yet there are other areas of the province that are also in desperate need of new facilities now.

Let’s hope the government unlocks the power of public-private partnerships to deliver these facilities in a timely fashion so that none of us are waiting 14 years for the next hospital to be built.