PCs appear to ignore Brampton again: funding for second hospital absent from 2025 budget

After its recent reelection, the Ford government revealed its financial blueprint for the year on Thursday as Brampton residents wait for a badly needed second hospital that has been promised for decades.

“A Plan to Protect Ontario” was presented by Peter Bethenfalvy, Minister of Finance, who outlined $56 billion over the next decade to enhance province-wide healthcare infrastructure, including $43 billion in capital grants to support 50 hospitals and the addition of 3,000 beds across Ontario.

The only mention in the budget document of Brampton’s long-awaited Peel Memorial Phase 2 expansion appears in a section detailing the Province’s 10-year Capital Plan. There are no details of how much money is being handed out for the project. It states the government is supporting “the March 2025 start of construction” but no contractor has been chosen to begin this work. There is no line item for 2025 indicating any money is being allocated this year, even though it was part of the PC election platform, which vowed to improve the city’s crumbling health infrastructure by increasing capacity.

"Our government remains committed to strengthening healthcare infrastructure across Ontario, including in fast-growing communities like Brampton," Brampton PC MPP Hardeep Grewal wrote in an email to The Pointer. “We continue to take steps toward expanding access to care and addressing capacity challenges through responsible, long-term planning and investment. We remain focused on delivering meaningful improvements that support the health and well-being of all Ontarians."

Currently, the city only has one hospital, Brampton Civic, while Peel Memorial is an out-patient facility designed as a preventative care wellness centre with no in-patient healthcare. The limited number of procedures performed there involve patients who receive treatment or minor surgery and then return home the same day.

The City of Brampton, the Opposition NDP and healthcare advocates have called on Ford to expand Memorial into an 850-bed full-service hospital with all the major clinical wards and services including a 24/7 emergency room. Its current urgent care service is not open around the clock, and Ford’s scaled-back plan is to expand Memorial into a 250-bed facility that would relieve pressure from Civic (which has 645 acute-care beds) primarily by offering patient recovery with no acute-care beds. It would not be a full-service “general hospital”.

The Pointer reached out to Brampton's five PC MPPs, the office of the Premier, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Finance, and the Treasury Board, about the promised funding for Memorial’s Phase-2 expansion and why there is no line item in the 2025 budget document for the project. Despite a commitment Friday from the finance ministry that a response would be provided later in the day, nothing was received ahead of publication.

Janine Herrmann-McLeod, co-chair of the Brampton-Caledon Health Coalition, expressed frustration after the 2025 budget was released Thursday.

"Considering the fact that Brampton Civic Hospital went hundreds of millions of dollars over budget due to being built as a public-private partnership with William Osler Health System in the early 2000s, it's not surprising that Ontario's government is holding information on the Peel Memorial Expansion close to the vest, but it is very disappointing," she said.

"Perhaps they think that if they don't commit to funding, they can't be accused of canceling funding or making false promises, or maybe they are just ignoring us as usual. It seems they are hoping this healthcare funding will fall under the radar and the political will will not appear to make them fund it, but we cannot and will not accept scraps." 

She also raised concerns about the accountability of contracts being awarded to private companies.

"There is a pattern of Ontario playing fast and loose with Brampton's hospital system, and if we can't get a fully public hospital system, the least we deserve is an actual commitment to funding, transparency over where that funding is going, and how government contracts are being assigned, and accountability for both government and private parties involved," Herrmann-McLeod said. 

"People in Brampton have already lost out on needed healthcare due to underfunding, wasting money giving hospital building contracts to private companies, and opaque financial management. We should have had this hospital many years ago. We should have additional hospitals by now. We cannot allow it to be delayed, underfunded, or mismanaged, because it costs us our health and lives. It enrages me that they will not do better for Brampton, and having nowhere to go for healthcare is making people here, including myself, feel hopeless, desperate, and unsupported." 

William Osler Health System, which manages Peel Memorial and Brampton Civic, provided the following response Friday to the provincial budget’s lack of a funding commitment for Memorial: "The transformation of William Osler Health System’s (Osler) Peel Memorial into Brampton’s second hospital continues to move forward, with the start of early construction and the evaluation of Request for Proposals (RFP) submissions," spokesperson Catalina Guran wrote in an email.

"Osler is grateful to the provincial government, the City of Brampton, Osler Foundation, donors, and the community for their continued support as it works to increase hospital and health care capacity to benefit people across the region. Specific questions about the 2025 Ontario budget should be directed to the provincial government."

The characterization of the current expansion plan as a “transformation” to a “second hospital” for Brampton is misleading. What has been presented by Osler and the provincial government as the plan for Memorial’s expansion would not put it into the same category as Brampton Civic, which is a “general hospital”. 

The lack of a funding commitment and a timeline for construction that does not yet include the selection of a construction partner, did not stop Ford, Mayor Patrick Brown and all five Brampton PC MPPs from taking a photo at Memorial right after the provincial election for a “groundbreaking” event. There was no groundbreaking for the actual construction of the new building, which did not even have a successful bidder at the time, and the event appeared to be nothing more than a photo-op for the politicians, including those who have promised the expansion for almost a decade. 

A “groundbreaking” announcement for Peel Memorial Phase II in March was done before the project even had a contractor to carry out the construction. One still has not been chosen.

(Government of Ontario)

Osler has repeatedly failed to provide an accurate timeline for when the expansion, which will not deliver the requested 850-acute-care-bed full service hospital, will be completed. 

Brampton was promised a completed full-service second hospital two decades ago. It currently has one-third the capacity per capita compared to the provincial average (0.9 hospital beds per 1,000 residents, compared to the provincial average of 2.3 beds). Civic has long been described as the home of hallway healthcare in Ontario due to its lack of capacity in a city of 800,000 residents, many of whom are forced to go elsewhere for hospital treatment.

Early this week, all five of Brampton’s PC MPPs opposed a motion by NDP leader Marit Stiles who called for the full funding of a second general hospital in Brampton.

Brampton resident and healthcare advocate Rhonda Collis questioned why the city’s MPPs won’t commit to a dollar figure for Memorial’s expansion to ensure residents get their fair-share of healthcare funding.

"Not only how much, but when? And as a community resident, if I had an opportunity to speak with them, I would say that when you run—I've said this before—when you run for your position, your political position, you make promises," she told The Pointer. "I want you to tell me how I hold you accountable because I have so little faith in your promises. I want details. I want specifics."

She continued: "I want to know how much, I want to know when, I want to know what I can do if you don't follow through. People are dying…".

Collis said the project has been delayed for more than a decade.

"I've lived in Brampton for 45 years. I've heard about this second hospital for many, many years, and nothing comes of it," she said. "I'm ranting now because I get angry, and I just can't comprehend how these politicians think that we will accept their lack of accountability and their lying."

A previous freedom of information request by The Pointer revealed that 3,035 patients were treated in hallways at Civic in 2019 and from April 2016 to April 2017, the number reached an all-time high of 4,352 patients, at the time, for a 12-month period.

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