2023-09-10 21:02:33
Quebec will announce this Monday the details of the most recent expansion project of the Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital in Montreal, the budget of which would amount to several billion dollars.
The Minister of Health, Christian Dubé, himself spilled the beans on the social network of Montreal and surrounding areas. Mayor Valérie Plante and the Member of Parliament for Rosemont, Vincent Marissal, who has defended the project for a long time, will be on site.
“We will announce at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow [lundi] good news to improve access to care for people in Montreal and the surrounding areas. We are at work for the patients and for the staff,” he wrote above an image showing an aerial view of the building.
His office declined to provide further details Sunday evening.
The project budget will amount to several billion dollars since it is certain that the financial analysis of the Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) will be revised upwards in the inflationary context. This evaluation, made public by Radio-Canada in the summer of 2022, estimated the project at 4.2 billion.
However, these figures will not surprise those familiar with the saga of the expansion of this establishment, the state of dilapidation of which has been repeatedly reported in recent years.
As of August 2021, Quebec had reserved an envelope of 2.5 billion to increase the hospital capacity of the establishment.
The Press then revealed in January that the CIUSSS de l’Est-de-l’Île-de-Montréal was evaluating a much less ambitious expansion scenario for its flagship, which would include the renovation of the most dilapidated building, the cruciform, to respect the initial budget envelope.
In the wake of these revelations, Minister Christian Dubé affirmed for the first time that the expansion project would be done “in phases”, which caused controversy. In fact, proceeding in this way forced the establishment to present a smaller-scale project and to maintain rooms in the cruciform, an option that we wanted to avoid due to the poor condition of the building.
Last April, Christian Dubé finally ruled out this scenario by announcing that the project would be carried out in a single phase and that he would therefore increase its budget of 2.5 billion.
The Maisonneuve-Rosemont hospital expansion project was the subject of a first announcement in 2018 by former Liberal Minister of Health Gaétan Barrette.
With Fanny Lévesque, The Press
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