Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont has a reputation for delivering good care, but the facilities are old and disgracefully dilapidated.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Earlier this month, Quebec Health Minister Christian Dubé donned a hard hat and brandished a shovel for the groundbreaking ceremony for a new parking garage at the Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont.
A 678-car and 76-bike parking garage hardly seems like a newsworthy announcement, even for a government barely clinging to power. But what this was really about was a long-delayed $5-billion hospital expansion project, and the political rot in the province that keeps health care from improving.
First, some context.
Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont is a sprawling facility in Montreal’s east end, one of the poorest parts of the province. It has a reputation for delivering good care. But the facilities are old and disgracefully dilapidated.
The hospital was created in 1971 with the merger of two existing hospitals: Hôpital Maisonneuve, founded by the Grey Nuns in 1954, and Hôpital Saint-Joseph-de-Rosemont, a tuberculosis sanitorium established by the Sisters of Mercy in 1950. (The history is a reminder that, prior to medicare, most hospital care was provided by religious charities.)
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Today, Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont is clearly showing its age. The main building is wrapped in a metal cage to prevent falling bricks from landing on the heads of passersby. This spring alone, the hospital experienced a flood, a lengthy power blackout compounded by the failure of backup generators, elevator breakdowns that required firefighters to rescue staff and patients, and the incursion of wildlife (a bird in cardiology, and a squirrel in intensive care).
Needless to say, there is also no air conditioning. Temperatures reached 40 C in some patient rooms during a summer heat wave. And the 450-bed hospital is routinely overcrowded: Four patients to a room is standard, and wait times in the hospital’s rundown ER are epic.
Neither the problems nor the political promises to fix them are new. Back in 2012, Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont was in the news for its catastrophic wait times – an average of 36 hours – which were blamed on a lack of space. So Jean Charest’s Quebec Liberal government of the time promised $64-million for a new ER as part of a massive $900-million upgrade to the hospital.
Those renovations, predicted to last 10 years, never got started. The Liberals were defeated in the provincial elections by the Parti Québécois, which promised to clean up the mess in health care. Residents of east end Montreal, a PQ stronghold, were convinced they would finally get a new hospital. But, alas, there were other priorities.
Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont is clearly showing its age these days.Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press
Then, in 2018, with the Liberals back in power under former neurosurgeon Philippe Couillard, provincial health minister Gaétan Barrette said that renovations at Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont would happen, at an estimated cost of $1.8-billion. But shortly thereafter, the Coalition Avenir Québec took power. In 2021, Mr. Dubé authorized a $2.5-billion budget for the hospital rebuild; in 2023, he announced it again, but the price tag had risen to almost $4-billion. With an election coming, another promise is surely imminent.
Despite initial plans being watered down – there will be (in theory) 270 additional beds built, bringing the total to 720, but not a new cancer centre or dedicated research pavillion – the budget now exceeds $5-billion. But bear in mind that the money has yet to be budgeted, except for the parking garage.
Dithering is costly. The budget has grown five-fold since 2012, and doubled since 2018. Every month of delay adds millions to the cost.
Five billion dollars to build 270 new hospital beds is an outrageous sum, with or without the new parking garage – even by Quebec’s profligate standards. And if work were to begin today – ha, ha – the first patients would not occupy those beds until 2037, at the earliest.
Consider that rebuilding the fire-ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris cost US$900-million and took five years. Or that construction of Cunard’s luxury cruise ship the Queen Anne (which sleeps 4,000 people) cost US$600-million and took six years to build.
Does hospital construction really cost that much more?
Let’s not forget that the province already spent a king’s ransom to build two “superhospitals” in Montreal. The Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal took 10 years and $3.6-billion; the McGill University Health Centre took eight years and $2.4-billion. In those cases, the political machinations were even worse than with Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont – but at least they eventually got built.
“In Quebec, our process before starting to build is very long,” Jean-François Fortin Verreault, the chief executive officer of the local health region, told Radio-Canada.
That gross understatement is an overly polite way of excusing the sickness at the heart of this sordid saga: Choking bureaucracy and gross political incompetence.