Signs of Our Times – Will Niagara, Ontario’s Southern Tier Really Get A New Hospital?

By Doug Draper, publisher, Niagara At Large

As we continue to ramp up Niagara At Large following a forced shutdown due to the flooding of our home base this summer, we thought it might also be a good time to revive an on feature here that we call ‘Signs of Our Times’.

Photo by Doug Draper

We launched ‘Signs of Our Times’ three years ago as a periodic post on NAL for focusing on real signs or billboards in our region that say something about the times we live in or the some of the issues facing us as communities. For some reason that we don’t think had anything to do with a lack of interest, Signs of Our Times fell by the wayside. But here we are  re-introducing it with a billboard that was unveiled with some fanfare in the Niagara, Ontario city of Niagara Falls this past spring.

It is a billboard that this NAL publisher finally got around to visiting a few weeks  back on a  corner of Montrose and Lyons Creek Roads, near the QEW in the southwest end of Niagara Falls – a billboard that boldly declares that this will be the site of a new hospital for Niagara Falls and the southern tier municipalities of Fort Erie, Welland, Port Colborne and Wainfleet.

Indeed, it was a year ago this past May that Kevin Smith, the CEO of the St. Josephs Hospital System parachuted in by the province, as a supervisor to try to clear the tracks of  the train wreck the already gone CEO Debbie Sevenpifer and the minions who constituted her board back in the  caboose made of the Niagara Health System, announced a recommendation for a new hospital for Niagara, Ontario’s southern tier communities. This, after a new $1.5 billion mega hospital for Niagara, now open, was already well under construction in the north end of the region in west St. Catharines.

Of course, people in Niagara’s southern tier, including politicians representing southern tier communities, were feeling sore about the possibility that most, if not all, acute care services in hospitals in Fort Erie, Welland, Port Colborne and Niagara Falls might eventually be “centralized” – a word NHS spin smiths have chosen to use, even though the west St. Catharines hospital pushed through by Sevenpifer and company, is hardly at a central site in the region and is expected to eventually house all, if not most, of the acute care hospital services from across the region as per Sevenpifer and company’s so-called ‘Hospital Improvement Plan’ tabled some three years ago.

It – the HIP, for short – was tabled, by the way, after it was too late for so many suckers in Niagara’s southern tier to realize that Sevenpifer and company were never serious in their vow, stated before so many town and city councils in the southern tier in the year or two leading up to the release of the HIP – to support the continued functioning of “community based hospitals” like those in Welland, Port Colborne and Fort Erie.

So Smith is parachuted in and he realizes that politicians and the people they represent in southern tier communities feel they have been cheated around all of this and he put a recommendation on the floor for yet another new hospital in the southern tier. To make circumstances even more interesting for a region that has experienced its share of parochial tiffs, Smith asked southern tier mayors to get together and decide where that new hospital should go, and out of those closed door sessions that must have been lively, to say the least, this site in the southwest end of Niagara Falls.

This NAL publisher has repeatedly heard from some southern tier residents that they hope this site in Niagara Falls for a new hospital will be approved by the provincial government. Others in communities like Welland, Port Colborne and Wainfleet say this site is too far away for residents in their communities and they would rather see steps taken to update the half century old hospitals in Port Colborne and Welland. 

Still others argue that Smith’s recommendation is merely a way of distracting southern tier municipalities away from the inevitable movement of critical hospital services for all of the region to the NHS’s new mega hospital in west St. Catharines. They go on to say that it is unlikely that a province, billions of dollars in debt, would fund another new hospital in this region anyway – especially when so many other regions of Ontario have been waiting for years for a new hospital.

What do you think? Share your views below. And also, we ask you, to share images in a jpeg format of any signs you find that could be the focus of comment here. Take a shot of them and send them to drapers@vaxxine.com .

(Please remember that Niagara At Large only posts comments by individuals who also care to share their first and last name with their views.)