“Windsor Essex Chapter Council of Canadians and Windsor On Watch at the Mega Hospital is not a done deal event.” Photo by Randy Emerson.
The Council of Canadians Windsor chapter protested this morning against the proposed $2-billion mega-hospital in Windsor being located on County Road 42, more than 13-18 kilometres from the city’s core.
The group “Citizens for an Accountable Megahospital Planning Process” is saying:
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re-think the location of the new hospital -
re-think the demolition of the Metropolitan Hospital -
re-think the suitability of a brownfield site -
re-think the destruction of greenfield
Local residents oppose the building of the hospital on a large greenfield site on the edge of the city and continue to push instead for the hospital to be built on a redeveloped brownfield site in Windsor. CBC reports, “Residents maintain the [greenfield] location would create urban sprawl, deter new investment in the downtown and create barriers for anyone in the core trying to get to the hospital.”
The concerns being expressed include:
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The proposed location for the mega-hospital would be 12.5 kilometres from Windsor’s centre – “this will take our healthcare further away from the core than any other city in Canada!” -
“Both Metropolitan (South Walkerville) and Ouellette (Downtown) campuses will be demolished.” -
“There was only a very limited consultation process. There was one public survey and it was only available for input for two weeks. Other than that, there were no mechanisms to objectively collect and measure the residents’ feedback.”
An article in OurWindsor.ca quotes Doug Hayes and Randy Emerson, both Windsor chapter activists.
Hayes says a better plan would be to build an additional hospital in an area suitable for residents of Kingsville, Essex, Amherstburg and LaSalle to “take a gigantic load off the hospitals here in the city of Windsor”, as well as to keep the existing hospitals now in place. And Emerson expressed concern about building a new hospital on the agricultural greenfield site, which would reduce the available lands for growing local crops. He says, “We should not be expanding further on farmland and expanding even further for putting infrastructure around it. What should be done is it should be on a brownfield site, which is already an existing site.”
For more information on this campaign, you can visit their website here and their Facebook page here.
To take action on this issue, please click here.
