St. Mary’s Hospital expansion to undergo further study

More than five years after the former Liberal government announced it would expand St. Mary’s Hospital in Côte-des-Neiges, Health Minister Gaétan Barrette announced on Friday that Quebec will spend $1.5 million to study the project further.

In what some observers slammed as a pre-election stunt, Barrette arrived at St. Mary’s with its former popular executive director, Dr. Arvind K. Joshi, to deliver the news.

“I am delighted to see this project come to fruition as it will substantially improve the quality of the hospital’s patient-care experience,” Barrette said.

The Health Department issued a statement entitled “Modernization of care units at St. Mary’s Hospital,” suggesting that work on the $65-million project would soon begin. However, the very last sentence of the news release reveals approval of the project could come only in 2019 — a year after the next provincial election. Quebecers will go to the polls in October 2018.

Even if the project is approved in 2019, it would then move to “the planning phase, with a view to completing its business plan,” according to the statement.

A longtime St. Mary’s donor expressed skepticism. “This is just another empty Liberal pre-election promise,” said the donor, who agreed to comment on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Under Barrette’s reforms, St. Mary’s lost its executive director and is now being managed by the West Island health authority based out of the Lakeshore General Hospital in Pointe-Claire. St. Mary’s has struggled with millions of dollars in budget cuts and the elimination of its vascular-surgery program.

Despite those cuts, Barrette went into detail about the expansion, which would add two floors to the D-wing on Légaré St.

Catherine W. Audet, Barrette’s press attaché, blamed the former Parti Québécois government for cancelling the project. The PQ formed a minority government in September 2012 — five months after then-health minister Yves Bolduc announced that work would begin on the expansion, clearly suggesting it had already been approved.

“We updated the studies on the evaluation of the project and took the necessary steps to achieve it, contrary to what the PQ did,” Audet said by email. “As the minister has often mentioned, and as the minister once again said in his speech today, this announcement is provisioned, as are all the announcements we make.”