Niagara South Mayors’ Annual Address To Constituents Ignores Gorilla In The Room – Hospital Services For Region

By Doug Draper

If there is any doubt that Niagara’s southern tier holds a golden key to the region’s future, there was sure no hint of it at the annual Mayors of South Niagara luncheon this Feb. 4.

Port Colborne Mayor Vance Badawey addresses annual south Niagara mayors' summit as Fort Erie Mayor Doug Martin and Wainfleet Mayor Barbara Henderson listen on. Photo by Doug Draper

More than 200 makers and shakers from across the region, including many of Niagara’s top political and business leaders, packed a banquet room at the Sparrow Lakes Golf Club in Welland to hear five of the region’s mayors – Dave Augustyn of Pelham, Vance Badawey of Port Colborne, Damian Goulbourne of Welland, Barbara Henderson of Wainfleet and Doug Martin of Fort Erie – focus on the achievements and challenges facing a part of the region poised to possibly experience an unprecedented amount of business and residential growth over the next few decades.

The mayors too turns focused on five pillars for building a healthier, more prosperous future for Niagara’s southern region, including revitalizing downtowns, agriculture, transportation, stimulus funding for building roads, recreational and education facilities and other infrastructure, and building an economic gateway to people and markets across the Canada-U.S. border and around the world.

But fo a handful of women from Port Colborne and Fort Erie who attended the luncheon sporting the attire of the Yellow Shirt Brigade – a citizens group struggling to save hospitals services in Niagara’s southern tier, the 800-pound gorilla in the banquet hall was hospital services because they were never discussed. So the women in the yellow shirts walked out at the end of the luncheon, wondering how the mayors could spend an hour outlining their collective efforts for growth in south Niagara without ever once mentioning health care services.

“How can all of the grandiose plans for the future of the southern portion of Niagara be achieved without accessible health care, and hospitals to care for the sick and dying,” said Joy Russell, a Fort Erie resident and one of the Yellow Shirt Brigade members who attended the Feb. 4 event. “If they widen roads, improve water and sewers, and entice more people (to live and establish businesses in the southern tier), what is going to happen to them if they have an accident or need a hospital bed nearby?”

It is a damn good question. And it’s one that has been asked by a number (if not enough) area politicians, doctors and others in this region, including this columnist. It has been asked over and over again since the the Niagara Health System (the provincially created body overseeing the amalgamation of most of the region’s hospitals) made its totally outrageous and irresponsible announcement more than five years ago to build possibly the only new hospital complex Niagara for which the province is likely to approve for this region for decades to come near a car-clogged, big-box-store clustered corner of west St. Catharines.

You can ask Debbie Sevenpifer, CEO of the Niagara Health System (NHS), until you get so frustrated you are ready to take a gun to your own head why she and her minions decided to site this new hospital complex, which we know will ultimately be the regional hospital for Niagara, in such a hard-to-drive-through corner in region’s north-end, and all I’ve ever got back is an answer to the effect that Niagara’s most populated municipality – St. Catharines – needs a hospital.

Take that to mean that Debbie and company are going to suck up to Bradley and his bosses (including whoever the health minister happens to be and Premier Dalton McGuinty) and to hell with the rest of the region. It may even mean Bradley’s name is etched on the walls of the $1.6 million pyramid some day and that’s a good thing. When people across Niagara, for decades to come, ask why the only new hospital our region gets (complete with first-of-a-kind cancer treatment and cardiac centres for Niagara) was located in this ridiculous location, Bradley’s name should be right there on the walls of this place as a reminder.

Let me be even more blunt in a response to Sevenpifer and her bunch’s pitch that the new hospital complex (now well under construction, so it is to0 late to stop it now) must be built in St. Catharines because it is the biggest municipal fish in the Niagara region’s pond.

It may very well be – given our regional government’s totally defensible goal for encouraging more growth to the south – that in another decade or so, Welland or Port Colborne or Fort Erie will be home to more people and businesses than St. Catharines. But never mind having the courage to look beyond crass parochialism and politics to find a location for this so-expensive hospital site with a vision to the future.

Thanks to Sevenpifer, Bradley and company, the new hospital – rather than being located in a more central location in Niagara – will be located in his riding. And that’s final! Sevenpifer, as much as so many people across this region want to train their anger on her, is just doing his and McGuinty’s bidding. She is their heat shield and I guess if I were them, I’d pay her more than $350,000 a year to keep the kind of anger swelling up across this region off my back.

But getting back to the south Niagara mayors’ luncheon, one of the mayors, Vance Badawey of Port Colborne, responded to why the 800-pound gorilla was not mentioned once during the whole proceedings with the following words to Niagara At Large – “What we spoke about (Feb. 4) were projects we have been working on together. …

“Unfortunately, health care has not been one of them. Although the City of Port Colborne has been working extremely hard to enhance Community Based Primary Health Care and re-establish emergency “acute” health-care services, because we don’t all agree about the current state of health care within the southern tier of Niagara, much of the work to date has been done only by few of us.”

“The City of Port Colborne continues to be adamant that we are not satisfied with what has been recommended (in the Niagara Health System’s Hospital Improvement Plan), both within our community and throughout the southern tier of Niagara. Hence the reason for our due diligence to date. Although the negative effects are shared by all of Niagara, unfortunately the efforts to work toward solutions such as a plan for rural and small community emergency services, as proposed by our community, has proceeded with the efforts of only a few of us.”

Unfortunately, it has proceeded with all too few of us, including too few members of our local municipal and regional councils, and the province.

In the municipal and provincial elections ahead, we have to work harder to field and support candidates that are more interested in putting parochial interests and their own political careers aside, and work for a better future for all of Niagara’s residents.

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