There was no mention of long-awaited funding that's needed to progress the planning of a new Whitby hospital in the Ontario government’s 2024 budget despite Premier Doug Ford promising publicly in February that it’d be announced “very shortly.”
The absence of funding for a Whitby hospital stood out in a budget projecting $36 billion in provincial spending on more than 50 new or upgraded hospital projects in the next decade.
Over two years ago, Lakeridge Health announced its board of trustees — following the advice of an independent expert panel — selected a site submitted by Whitby’s municipality for where in Durham a new hospital should be built. Since then, the region’s health system and hospital network has been waiting for a $3 million planning grant to move the project forward.
On Wednesday, Whitby Mayor Elizabeth Roy told The Trillium she’s “frustrated” her municipality’s request wasn’t granted in the Ford government’s 2024 budget.
In a statement published shortly after the budget was released, Roy called Whitby hospital funding’s exclusion “unacceptable” considering what Ford promised in a radio interview several weeks before.
“There’s going to be a Whitby hospital,” Ford said in a Feb. 15 interview on CKDO, a local station. “Is it going to be tomorrow? Not tomorrow, but down the road, very shortly, we will be issuing the planning grants.”
Roy, who was a longtime councillor before being elected mayor in 2022, has made bringing the hospital closer to fruition one of her mandate's central missions.
On Feb. 7, about a week before Ford said a next-stage grant would be issued “very shortly,” Roy announced the launch of a municipal advocacy campaign aimed at securing the funding.
Whitby is one of eight lower-tier municipalities in Durham, the region directly east of Toronto. Durham is home to more than 700,000 residents, according to a few different data sources. It already has one of the province’s — and country’s — faster-growing populations, and its regional government has projected it’ll come close to doubling by 2051 to become home to over 1.3 million people.
Roy’s statement on Tuesday said Durham's health-care system “is already stretched to the limit.”
There are four full-service public hospitals in Durham, according to Lakeridge Health-provided information, and just under 900 beds in the region. By Lakeridge Health’s estimation, the region will need almost 1,000 new in-patient beds to be built over the next 25 years. Lakeridge Health has also said it’ll take 10 years for a new hospital to be completed in the region.
Asked on Wednesday about funding for a new hospital in Durham being absent from his 2024 budget, Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy said Health Minister Sylvia Jones is “seized with planning grants for new hospitals right across the province… including in Whitby.”
“Whitby in the Durham region is absolutely on our radar in terms of where the next steps will happen,” Jones, the health minister, said shortly after on Wednesday. “We have a lot of capital that we’re doing… right now and we’ll continue to make those investments going forward because you have to plan for 10 and 20 and 50 years into the future.”
The Ford government's 2024 budget said as a result of the $36 billion in capital grants — which is part of the $50 billion the province plans to spend in total on health infrastructure in the next 10 years — will create 3,000 new hospital beds in the province.
Some efforts by Roy and her municipality have achieved some success in the last year. In March 2023, Whitby was still jockeying with Pickering over where within Durham to locate a new hospital. Roy said on Wednesday that she’s since received the premier’s “commitment” that it’ll be located in Whitby.
Others, evidently, haven’t been — at least not yet.
The advocacy campaign the town launched on Feb. 7 is set to wrap up next week. Through it, Roy said “over 3,000 residents” either signed a letter of support or shared stories that’ll be shared with Ford’s office attesting to the need for a new hospital in Whitby.
Within the last year, Whitby also briefly enlisted John Capobianco, a conservative strategist who works as a lobbyist of FleishmanHillard HighRoad Corp., to help its efforts, without much success, according to Roy.
Roy said the town will soon be reaching out to each of Durham’s MPPs, the province’s health minister, and Ford about the issue to “keep the conversation going.”
The Ministry of Health is the province’s highest-spending ministry. The 2024 budget Bethlenfalvy released on Tuesday plans for $75.6 billion in Health Ministry spending in the upcoming fiscal year, which is 35 per cent of all government spending. It plans for $3.6 billion of health expenditures to be on infrastructure upgrades for the sector in 2024-25. Bethlenfalvy’s budget also highlighted that, over the next decade, $620 million is planned to be spent on “urgent” upgrades to health-care facilities’ rods, windows, fire alarms, security systems and more, along with $500 million to be spent over the next decade “for small hospital projects and community health programs.”
—With files from Jessica Smith Cross and Jack Hauen
