Vaughn Palmer: NDP unveils third in trio of major hospital updates in Metro Vancouver
Credit to Author: Stephen Snelgrove| Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2019 01:20:44 +0000
VICTORIA — Premier John Horgan announced a sweeping redevelopment of Burnaby Hospital on Tuesday, the third step in a multi-billion-dollar plan to rebuild and expand hospitals in and around Vancouver.
The New Democrats were just a few weeks into their term in September 2017 when they committed $1.1 billion for the second and third phase of a replacement for Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster.
Next came the firming up of a long-promised replacement of St. Paul’s Hospital, to be relocated from Vancouver’s West End to a site at the east end of False Creek. The St. Paul’s project made it into the budget’s capital plan for the first time this year, with a $1.915 billion price tag.
The green-lighting of those two projects had folks in Burnaby asking the whereabouts of the NDP’s election promise to replace their antiquated hospital, built in 1952 and having had no substantial upgrades in the past 40 years.
Health Minister Adrian Dix had excused the delay last year by saying the planning was not far enough along. “We’re obviously working hard on the planning,” he told the Burnaby Now newspaper when the hospital was left out of the 2018 capital plan. “Until something is formally approved with specific numbers around it, it doesn’t go into the budget.”
Nor did Burnaby make the plan this February. Tuesday it finally made the cut, with Horgan announcing a $1.3 billion commitment to two new patient buildings, an expanded cancer treatment centre and a bigger emergency department.
The replacements will be built in stages on the same site as the existing hospital. The first $560 million instalment will be up front in the capital plan in next year’s provincial budget.
One key concern, addressed in all projects, is seismic upgrading. A 2015 report flagged B.C.’s aging hospitals as being especially vulnerable to earthquakes and in urgent need of retrofitting.
When fully operational in 2026 and 2027, the trio of facilities will be within a few kilometres of each other.
But Horgan defended the NDP priorities, saying Burnaby residents were as entitled as anyone to modern facilities.
“It’s been 40 years since the last upgrade of this facility, and that’s way too long,” he told reporters. “Burnaby is growing rapidly, and the hospital needs to be upgraded and modernized to keep up.”
Dix for his part flagged the Burnaby project as “certainly the largest health care capital contribution in B.C. history” in terms of direct provincial funding.
Though the overall budget for the St. Paul’s project is larger, the province expects the hospital foundation to raise hundreds of millions of dollars toward the cost of construction. Jim Pattison has already contributed $75 million. The sale of the existing site in the West End is expected to help cover the almost $2 billion cost as well.
There was also a call at the media conference for an update on the NDP promise to develop a second hospital in Surrey.
That project is in the early planning stages, replied Dix, echoing what he said last year about Burnaby. Back in 2017 he said the Surrey process, from planning through construction, could take six to 10 years.
But it is not as if the New Democrats are neglecting commitments to hospital expansion in other parts of the province.
Also in various stages of planning are new facilities in Richmond, North Vancouver, Terrace, Dawson Creek, Langley, Fort St. James, Cowichan Valley and Williams Lake.
As Dix has noted publicly, while many of those projects are in Liberal-held ridings, Burnaby, with four NDP MLAs, had to wait until today for its commitment.
The New Democrats have also followed through on capital projects launched under the B.C. Liberals, including more than $400 million for a new patient care tower at Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops and the first $260 million phase of the redevelopment at Royal Columbian.
Dix said that the Burnaby redevelopment will be the last major hospital announcement for now.
The Health Ministry and the regional authorities are shifting priorities to develop more long term beds in stand alone care facilities, as a way of taking pressure off the acute care space in the hospitals.
Overall, the New Democrats are budgeting to spend $6.3 billion on capital construction for health care facilities — finishing existing projects, starting new ones — over five years.
The tally represents about a 50 per cent increase of health capital spending in the last five years under the B.C. Liberals. In the current budget and fiscal plan, the New Democrats have health capital spending increasing at about 10 per cent a year, double the rate of growth of the provincial economy.
Still, the borrowing for health care facilities remains part of a taxpayer supported debt that is to date rated as manageable by the major credit agencies.
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On Saturday I mixed up two findings from the report of the inquiry into gasoline prices.
I wrote that the commission had identified 13 cents a litre as the “premium” on gasoline prices in Metro Vancouver. In fact the inquiry panel wrote that the unspecified “premium that is paid is in addition to the unexplained 13 cents per litre differential we found between the Vancouver and Pacific Northwest wholesale gasoline prices.”
I plan to write more about the report later this week. For now, I regret the misreading.