Montreal General expansion cancelled by Liberals in 2014
Plan was similar to $300M project Barrette recently announced
Health Minister Gaétan Barrette was all smiles when he announced a $300-million expansion of the Montreal General Hospital more than a week ago.
Barrette made the announcement two months before the upcoming Oct. 1 provincial election. But two months after winning the last election in 2014, the Liberal government quietly killed a $380-million expansion of the same hospital that had already been approved years earlier, according to a government document obtained by the Montreal Gazette.
The Montreal General was supposed to have a new, enlarged emergency room by now if the government had stuck to its original plans. In the past decade, however, staff at the Montreal General have complained that the hospital has fallen into disrepair through neglect, and some fear that the latest announcement might be nothing more than a shallow pre-electoral promise, given that a feasibility study must first be conducted before approving the expansion yet again.
It was in 2005 that the McGill University Health Centre, which oversees the Montreal General, announced the expansion.
The project was to include a helipad for the Montreal General’s Level 1 trauma centre as well as extensive renovations to the congested emergency room, among many other new features.
On April 13, 2011, the MUHC proclaimed that “its revised development proposal for the mountain campus (Montreal General Hospital) was accepted at the VilleMarie Borough council meeting.”
The provincial government went so far as to include the project in its “budget en immobilisation,” or capital-works program. Normally, when a project is added to the capital-works program, the government has approved it.
However, the project was declared officially cancelled in 2014 by the current Liberal government, two months after it won the last election. In 2015, during a routine review of spending by the National Assembly, the opposition asked the government about the evolution of all the hospital modernization projects since 2009.
The government responded that as a result of “budget adjustments,” the Montreal General expansion, estimated to cost $380 million, was withdrawn. The date of that decision was June 30, 2014, according to the document.
Barrette’s office declined to respond directly to a series of emailed questions by the Gazette, referring the matter to a ministry spokesperson.
Marie-Claude Lacasse, the ministry spokesperson, acknowledged that the government had previously decided not to invest in the Montreal General expansion. But she suggested that such a decision was made almost a decade before 2015.
“The government never authorized a major project at the Montreal General hospital before this year,” Lacasse said.
“The project that was developed during the start of the 2000s was withdrawn ... from approval due to the lack of sufficient funds to make it all happen.”
Lacasse did not explain why if the previous Montreal General project was never authorized by the government, it was nonetheless added to its capital-works program.
The government has authorized a $2-million study of the latest Montreal General expansion or “dossier d’opportunité.” Ultimately, the final decision will be made by the next government after the Oct. 1 election.
A veteran donor of the Montreal General raised doubts about the timing of Barrette’s announcement.
“I am very skeptical about this suspiciously timed pre-election funding announcement to do a feasibility study to renovate the Montreal General Hospital,” said the donor, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.
“Over the past decade, there has been so much talk about various renovations to the MGH, yet it has never looked so empty, so unkempt and so desolate as it does now. Where is all the money that was donated and where are all the renovations that were promised years ago?”
Julia Asselstine, assistant director of communications and engagement at the MUHC, explained that with the construction of the $1.3-billion superhospital in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce, the MUHC “decided to prioritize the focus of our teams on the completion of that project within the established budget and timeline.”
“In parallel, we made significant infrastructure investments at the MGH, including the modernization of our mental health, gastroenterology and cardiac-care units. We will be building on these improvements,” Asselstine added.
This is not the first time that Barrette appears to have recycled a hospital-construction announcement. Last December, he visited St. Mary’s Hospital to announce the government would spend $1.5 million on a feasibility study for a proposed $65-million expansion. But years earlier, the previous Liberal government had announced the same project.