South Edmonton Hospital & Health Campus | ?m | ?s | Province of Alberta

The UCP is firehosing right now. So much wild stuff coming out that no one can remember it all, or have time to be outraged by any of it.

Hospitals way over capacity, fracturing and possible privatization of the healthcare system, meeting with Tucker Carlson, Caught lying about why they paused renewables, firing the ethics commissioner, trying to leave the CPP, changes to the municipal government act (early but i really question the intentions behind this), the recent policy convention with plenty of eyebrow raising resolutions. Anything else I'm missing?
Yes, I feel they are using crazy stuff partly as a distraction, although some of their supporters actually believe it and are motivated by it too.

While we can't ignore it, we need to just not react to everything or focus on it alone. Really, most people don't care that much about the ethics commissioner. However, they do care about CPP and hospitals being over capacity.
 
Had drinks with a friend that was involved with this project. It's more or less dead. As far as he knows no work has been done. The only health care we will see is Stollery. So even if design was to start again it could be 5 years before we have use of a new hospital.
 
I'm indirectly involved with this project and while not "dead" there have been a large number of question marks raised about the state of this project lately.......I am getting the sense that focus is shifting to the stollery.
 
I'm indirectly involved with this project and while not "dead" there have been a large number of question marks raised about the state of this project lately.......I am getting the sense that focus is shifting to the stollery.
Yup. They're building a new ward to care for children who had a book read to them at a library.
 
While not to get political (I am going to anyway), THESE issues are where our mayor and council need to spend time being vocal on and advocating for. Being public about the needs for Edmontonians and the region. This region needs a new hospital so badly that publicly advocating for this is a must.

If only Sohi actually stayed in his lane and advocated for a new hospital as opposed to writing letters and tweets about issues that are happening on the other side of the world.

We need city council to work with the surrounding region UCP MLAs because this issue is a regional issue, there are not nearly enough beds in the Edmonton region. Sohi needs to stop writing letters to the PM about issues in the middle east and focus on what Edmontonians elected him for.
 
Frankly this is going to be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t think reaching out to Edmonton area MLA’s from the UCP is going to do anything. If anything, publicly advocating for something like that to a vocal degree might backfire heavily, considering Sohi (not this council necessarily since some of them have made vocal comments during the campaign) has a better relationship with Smith than with Kenney at this moment. (By virtue of Smith being more of a right wing populist than a principled fiscal conservative)

The only one MLA I could see doing something towards our direction is Searle Turton, and he’s one voice in a rural and Calgary dominated Cabinet. The rest? Absolutely inconsequential. 2 are new MLA’s (one is affiliated with Take Back Alberta), 2 Cabinet Ministers who are pretty much low key and quiet with less prestigious ministries and one re-elected MLA that’s out of cabinet.

The only person and way you can get anything done is to lobby the Premier directly or the Premier’s Office. Cabinet Ministers and backbencher MLA’s have relatively little or no power anymore in politics in this country anymore. Theoretically a cabinet minister can have autonomy and advocate for more decisions, but recently both federally and provincially, that’s not a thing anymore. All roads lead to the PMO (or PO) in our case. I’d argue Sean Fraser and his handling of housing is one of the few exceptions, but even then that’s iffy since most directions directly come from the PMO nowadays.

And with limited political capital being used for the restructuring of AHS? Yeah, it’s going to go nowhere.

People were warned, and to Edmonton’s credit, people listened.
 
Yup. They're building a new ward to care for children who had a book read to them at a library.

This is a very unfortunate take on the Stollery - while I agree a new hospital is needed in South Edmonton, equally needed is a new Stollery. I believe the Stollery is the largest children's hospital in the country (or continent) without a dedicated facility currently working out of the U of A.
 
Assumedly if a new standalone Stollery was built, their existing 200 some bed space would become general inpatient beds, which would help a lot with the current capacity issues.

That said, it's still an interesting decision to shift focus onto a new Stollery instead of the SW hospital but one that is difficult to criticize. The SW hospital project is clearly much further along, and IMO arguably more needed at least for the Edmonton metro region (over 40% of Stollery patients are from outside of that).
 
The Stollery project is also needed and the benefit would be (I think) that it would give back a good chunk of space to the U of A hospital. The question is where the heck do you put that one if it is now the priority? I think they would like to have it close as it is convenient for specialists and such working between the two, not to mention things like Ronald McDonald house in the area.
 
The Stollery project is also needed and the benefit would be (I think) that it would give back a good chunk of space to the U of A hospital. The question is where the heck do you put that one if it is now the priority? I think they would like to have it close as it is convenient for specialists and such working between the two, not to mention things like Ronald McDonald house in the area.
Apparently they spent a cool $1M trying to figure out where to put it.....I believe that was budgeted for 2023....so is the assessment completed? Who knows.....
 
Apparently they spent a cool $1M trying to figure out where to put it.....I believe that was budgeted for 2023....so is the assessment completed? Who knows.....
Rumor amongst the nurses at the Canadian Blood Services building (I donate there regularly) is that the Stollery wants to build their new building on the site of CBS. That seems to check out, at least since CBS will be moving to another location somewhere in 2025 as their lease isn't being renewed. I think it's an odd site to build on since there are still many less-utlilized sites on campus that would be much easier and cheaper to build on (i.e. parking lots).
 
Rumor amongst the nurses at the Canadian Blood Services building (I donate there regularly) is that the Stollery wants to build their new building on the site of CBS. That seems to check out, at least since CBS will be moving to another location somewhere in 2025 as their lease isn't being renewed. I think it's an odd site to build on since there are still many less-utlilized sites on campus that would be much easier and cheaper to build on (i.e. parking lots).
Is there any idea where CBS might be moving? I hope it's not in the middle of nowhere and somewhere near transit.
 

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