Brampton residents may have to raise $125M for hospital expansion despite no timeline on 24/7 ER

When his wife fell suddenly ill, Coun. Pat Fortini raced her to the city's only emergency room at Brampton Civic Hospital.

Fortini reached Civic between 10 and 11 p.m., where he recalls seeing a packed ER waiting room full of suffering patients. He said he was told to expect a 12-hour wait. Fortini left and took his wife, who has since recovered, to Georgetown Hospital — about a 30-minute drive west — where he said she received treatment within an hour.

The experience left Fortini shaken, but not surprised, at the plight of patients forced to wait several hours for care. After all, the council he serves on declared a health emergency in the City of Brampton in January 2020, even before the COVID-19 pandemic hammered the community. 

"They're in the hallway, just suffering. It's just not right," Fortini told CBC News. 

Brampton, a city with a population of nearly 650,000, has just one hospital complete with an emergency room. In comparison, Toronto, with a population nearing three million, has 15 emergency rooms.

Earlier this year, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that Brampton was getting a second hospital, but it's not a brand new facility. Instead, the government's plan is to expand the Peel Memorial Centre, an outpatient facility that offers a range of medical services but not an ER.

The facility does have an urgent care centre, but that is currently closed. The province said it will spend some $18 million this year and next to get it back up and running 24/7, but even then urgent care centres don't treat patients with potentially life-threatening illness.  

Ford's announcement was met with optimism, particularly by Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown and William Osler Health System (WOHS) president Dr. Naveed Mohammad. But others, like Ontario Health Coalition executive director Natalie Mehra, and members of the opposition, were left with questions, particularly around how the promise of new inpatient beds amounted to the same thing as building a new hospital.

There's also the question of who will pay.

Brampton residents may soon be asked to pay into a special hospital levy in order to raise $125 million for the Peel Memorial expansion, even though there's still no firm timeline for when it will have a 24/7 emergency room. Ford said only that an ER would be added "eventually."

City council is set to vote on that plan next month.

Fortini said he supports the levy and suggested it will amount to some $53 per year, for four or five years, for residents. But critics say Brampton residents shouldn't have to pay for better access to emergency care.

Mehra says the province should pay, especially because Brampton residents raised funds for WOHS to pay for the development of the Civic hospital.

"I think history matters, and frankly, the province of Ontario, for its terrible decision-making, owes Brampton," she said.