Maisonneuve-Rosemont, which serves 10% of Quebec’s population, is being restored and rebuilt. Everyone gets along, that’s a necessity.
However, the project has been in the pipeline since at least 2012. Why such a sparse revelation? We don’t have an exact cost or a timetable for about ten years.
No international space station
ten years! It’s discouraging. Of course, building a hospital is more complex than building a residential tower, but we’re not building the international space station either.
Every year dozens of hospitals are built around the world and you can imagine that in the last few years we have built the CHUM and the MUHC right here in Quebec, as well as major projects in Vaudreuil, Quebec or Sherbrooke. We have the expertise and the capacity.
And that’s what’s wrong with this announcement: the timing. Clinical planning and real estate analysis are already in place for HMR. A serious announcement would therefore have estimated a real opening in 4 or even 5 years rather than 10 years.
The first instinct is to say that this is what Quebec has become. A society that is unable to initiate and implement large projects. But it’s wrong. Building new hospitals shows that we are capable of this. What is missing is the political will.
- Listen to the interview with Dr. François Marquis, head of the intensive care unit at Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital on Benoit Dutrizac’s show via QUB radio :
East of Montreal was never a priority
HMR is like the blue subway line… a project that we announce and announce, but which we deliberately torpedo with endless project and preparation offices instead of getting to work. Who should pay for the blue line? The population of East Montreal… who have also been waiting for 30 years for the repair of Notre-Dame Street and the rehabilitation of the banks of the Saint-Laurent. The REM de l’Est, forget it.
If, according to Dubé, the Maisonneuve-Rosemont announcement is the most important for health in recent years, we have the right to expect efficiency and delivery within normal deadlines, that is, within 4 or even a maximum of 5 years. Otherwise it won’t be serious and we’ll still be mistaken for suitcases.
