South Niagara Needs A New Hospital Of Its Own
A Brief Commentary by Niagara At Large reporter/publisher Doug Draper
Posted August 12th, 2025 on Niagara At Large
During a recent walk down the main street of the South Niagara community of Ridgeway in Fort Erie, I noticed that a number of stores had signs in their windows that read; “Save Our Hospital.”
I found myself responding to one of the store owners by saying; “As someone now living in the North end of Niagara but who grew up in Niagara’s south end, I fully support you. However, I am afraid that horse left the barn a long time ago.”
What I met by that is that over the past 12 years since Niagara Health, the organization Ontario’s former Mike Harris government founded in 1999 to amalgamate all of our region’s hospital services under one body, opened the super hospitals in west St. Catharines, hospitals in Niagara’s south end got short changed.
Services at the hospitals in Fort Erie and Port Colborne, in particular, were reduced to nothing much more than “Urgent Care Centres” (UCCs), and even those have recently had their round-the-clock hours of operation reduced.
The Ridgway store owner I was having my conversation with said, in so many words, that maybe it is too late to save the hospital in his South Niagara community and that he should think about taking the “Save Our Hospital” sign out of his window.
I immediately said; “No, don’t do that! Keep fighting for a hospital. Fight for a new hospital.”
Niagara Health is continuously celebrating what it calls the ongoing construction of a new construction of a new hospital for South Niagara in the southwest corner of Niagara Falls.
My question are these.
A map showing where the new , so-called “South Niagara Hospital” is located. Does this look like it is in South Niagara to you?
Has Niagara Health bothered to go out and ask people in South Niagara if they see this hospital being built in Niagara Falls as a hospital for them because, based on my informal survey of people I talk to in the south end of Niagara and those of others, many of them don’t.
Has Niagara Health paid attention to how much municipalities in our region’s south end are growing due to an influx of people from the Greater Toronto Area where the cost of living has become increasingly impossible?
Why isn’t Niagara’s regional government actively and openly lobbying the Ford government for a new hospital for Niagara’s south end – especially when it should know that accessible health care services are key to the health and economic welfare of growing communities?
There can be little doubt that the City of Niagara Falls, which is the second largest municipality in Niagara and one that has been growing significantly, needs a new hospital of its own, if only it was being built closer to the centre of the municipality and not, as it now is, out in the fringes where it is covering more of what is left of our precious green lands.
Instead of choosing a location for the new Niagara Falls hospital in an urban area, our political leaders once again chose to locate it on prime green space, about as far away from an urban centre as you can get. They did the same when a site was chosen for the west St. Catharines hospital. Do you call this good planning?
But municipalities in South Niagara need a new hospital of their own too and there is no reason why a Ford government in Ontario that is so willing to blow tens-of-billions of our tax dollars on building and expanding highways and bridges and tunnels to accommodate ever more car and truck traffic shouldn’t’ be able to afford to build one more new hospital here.
Residents in South Niagara deserve all the support we can give them for full, high-quality hospital services of their own.
After all, why should they have anything less in the way of hospital services than residents in the Niagara Falls and St. Catharines areas do.
To read a related post on this issue, click on – It Is A ‘Very Impressive’ New Hospital – Located In Totally The Wrong Place | Niagara At Large
To read a Niagara Health newsletter on the so-called South Niagara Hospital, click on – https://www.niagarahealth.on.ca/site/south-niagara-hospital-project
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