From the Office of the Ontario New Democratic Party
Queen’s Park –The MPP for Welland, Cindy Forster, announced a motion tabled in the legislature this Thursday, November 21nd to replace the aging hospital in Niagara Falls with a new one and to protect local Niagara regional hospitals.
The NDP is calling on the Ontario government to ensure that hospitals like this one in the Niagara, Ontario community of Welland are kept open after any possibly new one is built and opened in Niagara Falls. NAL file photo.
“We are pushing this government to build a new hospital to replace the aging hospital in Niagara Falls but not at the expense of every other hospital in the Niagara region,” Forster said.
“The Liberals and Tim Hudak want the people of Niagara to believe that they need to lose their local hospital to get a new one in Niagara Falls. We disagree. What we need is to drop their failed privatization plan for building hospitals at sky high rates and use our public dollars wisely to make sure the aging Niagara Falls hospital is replaced with a new one, while healthcare in the region is protected.”Forster said savings can be found by cutting government waste and the high-cost private model of building hospitals in Ontario.
“Precious public healthcare dollars should go to frontline care, not line the pockets of private companies or six figure public sector CEOs. We are committed to finding savings by eliminating enormous government waste, like we’ve witnessed with eHealth and Ornge and the gas plant cancellations. And most importantly, in order to keep costs down, we need to move away from the Liberal Public-Private Partnership model of building hospitals.”
Forster tabled the following motion this November 21st:
“That, in the opinion of this House, the people of Niagara continue to have access to local high quality public healthcare, and therefore, that the Legislature commit to building a new full service hospital in Niagara Falls while preserving the Fort Erie Douglas Memorial site as an Urgent Care Centre with Complex Care Beds, the Welland site as a full service hospital with complex care beds, the Port Colborne site as an Urgent Care Centre with complex care beds and keep complex care beds in the Niagara-on-the Lake site.”
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Niagara At Large 
There should not be distances greater than a 30 km between hospitals. Common sense dictates that access to TIMELY health services is critical. Whoever thinks that shutting down the Welland hospital or any of the existing hospitals is crazy in my opinion.
Maybe we should deal with schools the same way…. let’s build a monster school in the west end of St. Catharines and ship every kid across the region to it…..
Everyone talks about cost…. cost…. cost…. Well you heard it here first… there is plenty of money to go around without raising taxes…..
Cut the waste…. waste…. waste…. waste….
Decreasing the NRP budget by 25% would be a good way to start!!! We need better health care before we need more quasi insurance company traffic enforcement employees….. That is after all 90% of what they do! I wonder how over budget the monstrous facilities they are building in NF are going to go? I wonder why the US police forces don’t require access to the budgets our police forces demand…. More accountability? Taxpayer influence or better yet control? Whatever the reason, this service and the others out there like it need to understand we are compromising MORE ESSENTIAL services to support their continuously increasing spoiled kid demands. Our politicians also need to develop a backbone when responding to these demands!
Just sayin………
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I pointed out at the Ontario Health Coalition Assembly recently that the large geographical location within which our population of 400,000 is found requires at a minimum three fully serviced hospitals and nothing should be shut down before they are all in operation.
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