That New Hospital They Are Building In The Region Is St. Catharines’ Hospital, So Get Over It!

A Commentary By Doug Draper

 Hey,  all you people out there in central and south Niagara.  That new hospital the Niagara Health System is building in north Niagara – the one towering beyond a jungle of strip malls and big box stores, out their on the western fringe of St. Catharines’ urban boundaries – that is a St. Catharines hospital okay!

If you think this new hospital being built in west St. Catharines in a regional hospital, forget it. It is a "St. Catharines hospital," according to St. Catharines regional councillor and the city's former mayor, Tim Rigby. Photo by Doug Draper.

 Have you folks in the central and south end finally got that!

 I’ve been meaning to bring this up in a commentary since St. Catharines regional councillor Tim Rigby pointed it out at one of the final meetings of the last regional council in late September in front of a gallery of south Niagara residents who are still foolish enough to demand that everyone in the region have fair access to emergency and other hospitals services.

At that infamous September 23 regional council meeting that dragged on for more than six hours, members of the Yellow Shirt Brigade, that group of south Niagara residents fighting against the NHS’s systematic downsizing of services in their community hospitals, had to wait until after midnight to find out that the council would not back a resolution approved by seven local municipalities for an investigation of the way the NHS manages area hospital.

Instead, they heard the following from Rigby – a former mayor of St. Catharines who, along with former Niagara Falls mayor Ted Salci and former Welland mayor Damian Goulbourne, made a special trip to Queen’s Park about five years ago to lobby the province’s health minister for NHS’s west St. Catharines hospital site as opposed to, say, locating perhaps the only new hospital for which Niagara is likely to receive provincial funding for many years to come. 

“Frankly, I get tired when I hear that somehow the St. Catharines hospital seems … to be the cause of this problem,” said Rigby, even as he prefaced his comments by saying he has sympathy for the concerns about hospital services expressed by folks in Niagara’s central and south ends. “This is a St. Catharines hospital … so don’t give me this nonsense that it should have been built up in Thorold.”

It is going to be a St. Catharines hospital is it?  This $1.5 billion complex (not to mention the millions of dollars of road upgrades and other infrastructure) all of us across the region are going to spend at least the next two or three decades paying for?

I know that the bit that this new hospital was going to be a hospital for the St. Catharines-Thorold area (except for the supposedly “regional” cancer and cardiac centres that are going to be located there, of course) was the propaganda coming from NHS CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and her board going back to the early 2000s, when they decided to eventually shut down the aging St. Catharines General and Hotel Dieu hospital sites in favour a spanking new hospital complex somewhere else in that city. They kept feeding residents across the region and their local councils the line that the NHS is committed to fully functioning “community-based hospitals,” including the ones in Fort Erie and Port Colborne, right up to the time the NHS released its so-called “hospital improvement plan” some two and a half years ago. 

That plan confirmed what many doctors in the Niagara health system and others across the region knew all along. That the new hospital, going in west St. Catharines rather than in some more central location that is equally accessible to all Niagara residents, is going to become Niagara’s regional hospital – the “super hospital” the NHS always pretended it would not favour over its false commitment to “community-based hospitals.”

Just check out the HIP (you can still download it on the NHS’s website) and you will learn that everything from where every baby is born in a hospital in this region, to many other services will be consolidated in the new hospital complex in west St. Catharines, while services available to residents in other hospitals across the region shrink.

So let’s not have any more illusions here and let’s stop insulting the intelligence of growing numbers of people across this region who now know that the NHS decided to build the new regional hospital complex for Niagara in a location that is hardly fair around the key issue of fair, equitable access for all the region’s residents.

So to Tim Rigby, would you please at least stop channeling the NHS’s old bunk by calling this a St. Catharines hospital? You are smart enough to know better than that.

It would make more sense to congratulate you and others in north Niagara for getting the only new hospital complex the province is likely to fund for this region in decades in our community. Hope you feel proud.

(Visit Niagara At Large at www.niagaraatlarge.com for more news and commentary on matters of interest and concern to our greater Niagara region.)