Nothing about CVH's "A" & "H" Block expansion is a 'P3'
Response to critics of hospital project

Credit Valley Hospital's badly-needed "A" and "H" Blocks got the construction go-ahead with an announcement by Mississauga West Member of Provincial Parliament Bob Delaney on August 22, 2005.

Some people have sought to liken the means by which projects like Credit Valley's Phase II are financed as equivalent to the discredited so-called "P3" projects (Private-Public Partnerships). Indeed the August 24th editorial in the Mississauga News suggested incorrectly that "Mississauga is getting its own P3", though "it will be a mini one."

Bob Delaney's Response to Mississauga News P3 allegations

I take issue with the premise of your editorial (P3 plan to build is here to stay, August 24, 2005). Your editorial's assertion that "Mississauga is getting its own P3. Well, sort of," is completely false.

P3 proposals transfer ownership, control and management of P3 facilities to the private sector, which then leases back these facilities.

The Credit Valley Hospital is publicly-owned, publicly-controlled, publicly-funded, and publicly-accountable. It is no "P3" facility. While Phase II is being built and after it is complete, the Credit Valley hospital will still be publicly-owned, publicly-controlled, publicly-funded, and publicly-accountable. The Phase II construction project will be managed by a Credit Valley Hospital staff member, whom I have met. He is paid by the hospital, and reports to its management.

Those firms that win contracts to help build the new Phase II facility will be suppliers, not partners. These suppliers will not own, manage or operate the hospital. Credit Valley's community board and management team will continue to run our community hospital, just as they have for the past 20 years.

In 2003, I joined with my party in opposing P3 hospitals. Right after the new government was sworn in, our government immediately moved to bring the only two P3 hospitals in Ontario back into the public domain. The Ontario Government subsequently passed Bill 8, the Commitment to Medicare Act.

I oppose P3 hospitals. The government in which I serve opposes P3 hospitals. If the proposal to build Credit Valley's Phase II had been a P3, I would not have supported it, and I doubt that our hospital's board would have either. P3 hospitals are not, in the words of your editorial, "a plan we must learn to accept." P3s were a bad idea in 2003, and remain a bad idea now. That's why the Government of Ontario has moved to keep hospitals in the public domain.

Ontario's 155 hospitals have an average age of about 40 years. They've been neglected for decades. In the coming years, Ontario needs more than 100 hospital capital projects to start. Financed the old way, it would take decades to serve the urgent needs of Ontarians. Financed the way proposed for Credit Valley's project, just like a mortgage, Ontario can get started on dozens of such projects in the short term, get them into service when and where they are urgently needed, and keep them in the public domain.

Tens of thousands of people in western Mississauga admit how good the people and medical care are at Credit Valley, and then go to Georgetown, Milton or Oakville to get urgent attention owing to the long waits or overcrowding at Credit Valley. Phase II will soon let them come to the hospital they want to go to anyway. And Credit Valley is, and will be, a public hospital, not a P3!