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Empire-builders try to destroy Port Colborne hospital

October 6, 2008 on 8:14 pm | In Social & Political Issues | No Comments

Port Colborne is under threat of losing its hospital that residents largely paid for out of their own paycheques, essentially unaided by outside money, starting first with the loss of emergency services and culminating in the facility’s disappearance into a $1billion-mega hospital over 30 minutes away in St. Catherines, Ont.

It’s part of the theft that keeps stealing as a result of the Tory regime of Ontario ex-premier Mike Harris that ended in his disgrace as he walked away from the messes he and his handlers created.

Harris and his band of NeoCon villains included Niagara Tory Tim Hudak whose wife Deb Hutton was a Harris handler (Harris was a dumbbell polished up as a Tory figurehead to turn Ontario into a money watershed for special interests).

They merged the Port Colborne hospital into a Niagara Health System bureaucracy with grand designs of medical empire. To that end they propose a mega-hospital they quietly estimate at $300 million. Since you can triple any bureaucrat cost estimates to convert them into actual numbers, it amounts to a $1 billion facility.

Step one is to kill local emergency rooms, including Port Colborne’s despite a promise by the McGuinty government to keep them strong as shown in this press release published by the Liberals December 12, 2007:

PORT COLBORNE – The McGuinty government is improving access to emergency services in the Port Colborne area by approving a $400,000 renovation of the emergency department at Niagara Health System’s Port Colborne General Hospital site, Deputy Premier and Health and Long-Term Care Minister George Smitherman announced today.

“Our government is committed to lowering wait times in emergency rooms because Ontarians deserve faster access to care,” Smitherman said. “This new state-of-the-art emergency department will help provide this improved care to Port Colborne area residents.”

The renovated emergency department will feature a new nursing triage area, improvements to the patient waiting area, better security features and infection control improvements.

“We’re excited to be moving forward with this important upgrade of our Emergency Department at the Port Colborne General Site,” said Debbie Sevenpifer, president and CEO of the Niagara Health System. “A modernized ER will be a better functioning ER to serve the needs of our patients.”

“Our government is making sure that Port Colborne area residents have the best possible access to hospital emergency care,” said Kim Craitor, MPP for Niagara Falls.

It’s up to the McGuinty government now to take control of the situation and return the formerly self-sustaining Port Colborne hospital to the people who actually paid for it before it was merged into the NHS mess and saddled with a deficit not of Port Colborne’s making.

They would suffer deaths and serious injuries being shuttled to emergency facilities so far away in St. Catherines.

Frank Touby