"Our future is just a little more secure today"
Bob Delaney announces CVH Phase II

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. His remarks are below.

Bob announces the go-ahead for the Phase II expansion of Credit Valley Hospital on August 22, 2005 before a packed tent on the very spot the facility will be built to take the pressure off waiting lists at our hospital.

Is the CVH Expansion a 'mini-P3'? Absolutely not! Read Bob's response to the Mississauga News editorial of August 24, 2005

Distinguished guests, members of the Credit Valley Hospital community, colleagues in government, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon. I want to thank everyone for taking a few minutes from your busy day to come out here to a parking lot for an announcement about the future of our community hospital.

Twenty years ago, this hospital opened. Eglinton Avenue was a two-lane road. Corn grew where the Erin Mills Town Centre now stands. Deer were commonplace in the neighbourhood. Today, our city’s population has nearly tripled. Mississauga alone grows by some 20,000 people each year. The bulk of that growth took place – and is still taking place – right here in Credit Valley Hospital’s back yard. And our hospital’s bed count has remained constant for all those twenty years.

We have been out of hospital capacity for some time. As our hospital administrators, your hospital board and my friends and acquaintances on the Credit Valley medical staff have pointed out with a single voice, our problem at Credit Valley Hospital is no longer so much a capacity problem as it is a safety problem.

As a newly-elected member, it took me some time to grasp the many facets of this issue, not merely here in our community, but also within the apparatus of government, where decisions on the use of public funds are made.

Along the way, I’ve learned about some false starts, and prior to standing before you today to describe how we are going to address our capacity issues here at Credit Valley, I needed to be sure that I’d be making a real announcement about a real facility that will really be built in the near future. We all held off this announcement until we were sure, and we are now sure of what we are saying.

My Legislative colleague and friend David Caplan is here with me today. David’s primary role in the Government of Ontario is as Minister of Public Infrastructure Renewal. He is putting his own credibility on the line here today as well.

Credit Valley needs new inpatient beds, and more space for related clinical services. It needs space to handle the 5,000 births it faces annually, because our hospital’s capacity is only 2,700. We need room for more maternal and newborn care. We need room for regional paediatrics, mental health programs, rehabilitation and complex continuing care.

The need is real, and the business case for Phase II at Credit Valley is sound and sincere. That’s why I am here to announce, on behalf of the Government of Ontario, and my elected colleagues who represent our community in that government, that the Province of Ontario has approved the Credit Valley Hospital’s plans for a Phase II expansion project.

This means that not long after the last construction workers have packed up from all the work on the Carlo Fidani Regional Cancer Centre and the ambulatory care centre, it will start all over again on this very spot for Phase II.

Based on the information I have seen, Phase II will be a four storey building that will stand right where we all are. If you grasp the subtleties of real estate, and floor space means something to you, I understand that the current estimate is about 275,000 new square feet of space. To put it another way, if you live in a 2,500 square-foot home, the new building will be equivalent to the floor space in about 110 homes like those surrounding our hospital.

We’ll be adding at least 140 desperately-needed beds to the hospital’s capacity. Wayne Fyffe will provide you with more of the facts and figures in just a few minutes.

I want to add an acknowledgment to some people who have helped make this announcement, and this new facility, a reality.

I want first of all to acknowledge Credit Valley’s management team and its board. Wayne Fyffe has been a patient tutor to me on the business of health care. His staff, especially Wendy Johnson, have been invaluable in providing us all the information we need: when, how and where we needed it. Similarly, the hospital board has been open and available, and has approached our community’s hospital need as a partner with our elected members.

In my pre-electoral career, I wore enough hats to be exposed to many different types of businesses, but health care was not one of them. I needed the opportunity to ask questions, digest information, relate it to what I knew, and most importantly, to identify the things I didn’t know, learn them, and work out a plan with Wayne, Wendy and Norm Loberg.

I frequently had to ask the same question, multiple times in different ways, before I understood many issues well enough to be effective with my colleagues, and within our government.

I think that we in this area have the greatest hospital team in Ontario. They’ve been generous with their time, fair and straight with me, and with my colleagues in the Legislature. We spend time on a regular basis in Wayne’s office understanding this hospital’s strengths, needs and challenges. The management team here have been the most effective allies and partners that anyone in government could ask for. Wayne, Wendy, Norm, we all thank you, and all who work with you.

Our hospital community is equally terrific. My own physician practices out of here, and he, and the other doctors, nurses, technicians and staff I’ve encountered both before and since my election helped me realize what a fine work environment we have here, and how the phrase World Class. Right Here. is truly much more than a slogan.

During this calendar year, I have read a petition in the Ontario Legislature that our hospital put into every home in our community. Many of the hospital staff have taken it home and signed it. They have also had their family, friends and patients sign it, and have returned those petitions, with their thousands of signatures, to my office.

Our need was real and our business case was sound. Your efforts in enabling me – and others – to read that petition just about every day that the Legislature sat was living proof that our need and our business case was matched by a solid community commitment from you.

In our effort to get our needs heard, my voice was echoed by my Mississauga colleagues: Vic Dhillon, who is here today; Tim Peterson; Dr. Kuldip Kular; and Peter Fonseca. Our hospital’s former chair, Harinder Takhar, is a member of the government’s cabinet and cannot read petitions to cabinet, as it would amount to, in effect, petitioning himself. I am sure I speak for him today as well.

The MPP for Peterborough, Jeff Leal, read our petition almost as often as I did this spring. Oakville MPP Kevin Flynn read it often too. Victoria Haliburton Brock MPP Laurie Scott read it. Other MPPs did too, and on your behalf, I thank them one and all.

The Minister of Health listened to us, and made time for me and for our hospital’s management. His staff worked with us to understand our needs, and to explain their own needs, procedures and constraints. Sitting as he does just two rows directly in front of me in the Legislature, I am sure that Public Infrastructure Renewal Minister David Caplan can recite our petition from memory. He always made time to talk with me about this project, and I can’t say enough about how helpful his advice and suggestions were.

This project will get under way in the 2007-08 provincial government fiscal year, which begins April 1, 2007. I’m not sure if the earth movers will rev up their engines on April 2, but I am confident that David and I will ensure that the construction noise and dust will start all over again on Credit Valley Drive early in that spring of 2007.

This leaves time between now and then to complete the drawings, go through a thorough and sensible planning period, and have a rigorous tender process. Wayne will update you on that too. We have the time and resources to do the job of planning Phase II properly.

You might ask how Phase II will be paid for. Most of us are familiar with buying a house in this area, so let me use an analogy.

We could, if we had the expertise, buy the land separately. We could then hire an excavator to dig the foundation. Then we could have a contractor bring in the cement, and have it poured and set properly. Next, we could hire framers, carpenters, roofers, electricians, plumbers, sheet metal workers, drywallers, painters and other trades to build our house.

But we don’t. We don’t do it that way because we don’t need to know how the house is built, we just want the house we need, and we want it built on time and on budget with care and quality. That’s why developers can do the job quicker, more accurately and more cost-effectively than we can as homeowners. That’s why we don’t pay them, as homeowners, until we are ready to move in. That makes the developer accountable for building the home on-time and on-budget, with care and with our involvement.

A similar process will finance our Phase II project at Credit Valley Hospital. Public Infrastructure Renewal Minister David Caplan will follow me to explain it in more detail to you.

This hospital, and its board and management, have shown repeatedly that they can build a structure on time, and within budget. In the upcoming years, our hospital’s management will showcase that project management expertise yet again with Phase II. We’ll start on time, and it will open on time.

A hospital is so much more than bricks and mortar. When we open a new school, the principals are fond of saying their buildings, and the people in them, are the soul of the community. If you tend to agree, then our hospital, and its people, must literally and figuratively be our community’s heartbeat.

Credit Valley’s Phase II is much more than “infrastructure.”

• I’m here to join with you all in celebrating the babies that will be born in Phase II to couples who haven’t even met yet;
• I’m here to offer hope for complex continuing care in Phase II close to the men and women who built Streetsville, Erin Mills, Meadowvale, Lisgar, Erindale and other neighbourhoods, and still live in their original homes in those neighbourhoods;
• I’m here to tell all those who drive to Milton, Oakville and Georgetown to use their emergency rooms because Credit Valley’s facilities are too crowded, that we’ve heard your voices, and that with Phase II, help at Credit Valley is on the way.

Thank you one and all for working with me and with my legislative colleagues in the Government of Ontario to get this project started. Our future as a community, and as families, is just a little more secure today.