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 X (formerly Twitter) a few moments after Radio-Canada revealed the news.
“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. According to Radio-Canada, the budget for the project would however amount to “several billions of dollars” and its implementation could extend beyond 2033.
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. However, the expansion project amounted to $4.2 billion, according to a financial analysis by the Société québécoise des infrastructures made public by Radio-Canada in the summer of 2022.
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 budget envelope of 2.5 billion.
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.