April 13 vote supports public hospital.
Produced with the Kingston Health Coalition, the commercial urges community members to vote April 13 on whether or not they want the proposed new psychiatric/rehab hospital to remain fully public.
Ontario is using the controversial public-private partnership model to replace the aging St. Mary's of the Lake and Providence Care hospitals. That means the hospital will be designed, built, financed and maintained for 30 years by a private for-profit consortium.
"At a time when the government is telling us they have no money we can't understand why the Wynne government would want to proceed with a far more expensive method of replacing these hospitals," said Warren (Smokey) Thomas, president of OPSEU.
A report from Ontario's Auditor General concluded that Brampton's William Osler Health Centre privatization in 2008 added about $200 million to the cost of the project, due to the higher rate of interest paid by the private sector. Transaction costs added an additional $28 million to the cost of the project.
Both of these issues are factors in the decision to build the new Kingston hospital.
OPSEU has done the only study of its kind in Canada about the impact of P3s on the day-to-day functioning of a public hospital. A year after the Royal Ottawa Health Centre opened as a P3, the report concluded there were additional costs to clinical budgets.
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