Laval city council, October 3rd. : a single hospital for 400 000 residents?

Addressing Mayor Gilles Vaillancourt, Andrew Szirt said, “a very large percentage of residents are going to Montreal to hospital because you do not have a hospital in the western half of Laval. It is unacceptable that for a population of 400,000 residents we only have one single hospital and the population is growing.

Cité de la Santé too far
“If someone has a heart attack in Ste-Dorothée or Chomedey it is too far to drive in an ambulance to hospital at Cité de la Santé on Boulevard René Laennec in Vimont,” he continued. “Since Quebec is getting $2.2 billion from the federal government, this would be a unique opportunity to ask for a hospital in Laval. Mr. Vaillancourt, please ask the Quebec government to build a hospital in Chomedey.”
Vaillancourt responded, “We’ve been asking for a hospital for the past 15 years and every time we ask this question of your MNAs I always remind them that hospital services in the western part of Laval we need a lot.” According to the Mayor, many residents of western Laval seek health care at Hôpital du Sacré Coeur in Montreal just across the Lachapelle bridge.
Vaillancourt suggested that Cité de la Santé would probably be large and efficient enough to accommodate everyone from Laval, if not for the extra burden it has to deal with because of people coming from the North Shore and beyond. “All these people are taking places,” he said. He suggested that Szirt contact his local MNAs, the Quebec Liberals’ Guy Ouellette and Michelle Courchesne.

Mayor blames Quebec
“They are the ones who have the key for that, it’s not the municipality,” said Vaillancourt. “Year after year after year we have been pressing them. I must tell you, though, that they have answered a lot of critical problems by building a new emergency centre.”
The mayor also noted that the MNAs were responsible for getting a new cancerology centre built at Cité de la Santé, while greatly improving services and the overall capacity at Laval’s only major hospital. “They invested in Cité de la Santé, but now tell them that you would like to have another hospital in the western part of Laval. That does not come from the municipal council. It comes from the provincial government.”
With the sort of heavy traffic that’s usually seen along the roads that lead from Laval to Montreal, another resident of Chomedey, Martin Berman, wondered how people from Laval can be expected to get quickly to a hospital in Montreal if Cité de la Santé is full as it usually is. “I started asking for this hospital five years ago,” he said. “You get older, you get sicker. This is a bigger city. It was big before. When I started yelling for a hospital we had 225,000 people. Now it’s 400,000.”

Mayor’s responsibility – Berman
Berman dismissed Vaillancourt’s assertion that it’s not the city’s responsibility. “When is this city council, when is this mayor going to not go to MNAs saying this is their responsibility? It’s the responsibility of the mayor and our representatives to demand the hospital, not to just nicely ask. Politics is politics but we are here.”
The mayor said he would have no problem taking up the issue with the Liberals once again. But Vaillancourt added that the Liberals have said they already invested considerably in Cité de la Santé, although a future stage of investment by the government could include either a new hospital in western Laval or at least greatly improved health care services in the western sector.