(County of Brant councillors John MacAlpine, John Bell, Lukas Oakley and Jennifer Kyle, and county staff Alysha Dyjach and Philip Mete met with MPP Anthony Leardi (centre) at AMO last week.)
County of Brant staff and councillors pushed hard for a new hospital at the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference in Ottawa last week.
Specifically, the county asked the province to grant Brant Community Healthcare System (BCHS) the remaining $8.5 million needed to complete the next planning stage and put the new hospital on the 2025 budget, Coun. Lukas Oakley wrote in a conference summary he shared with The Spectator.
Brantford General is the main hospital in the area, serving residents of Brantford, Brant County, Six Nations of the Grand River and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
It has been challenged to keep up with the rapidly growing population, and reached 125 per cent capacity in the winter, councillors heard at an administration and operations meeting in May.
Sections of the building are nearing 100 years old, and staff are dealing with space and infrastructure challenges — including an eight-foot-deep sinkhole over a utility tunnel last September.
The BCHS and local municipalities began trying to get a new hospital in 2010, but it has never advanced past the planning stage.
The 14-year lag is something Bonnie Camm, incoming president and CEO of BCHS, told councillors was “unusual.”
Following Brantford’s AMO delegation with Minister of Health Sylvia Jones, and the county’s meeting with her parliamentary assistant Anthony Leardi, Oakley said he’s “optimistic” the Ministry of Health understands the need.
In the lead-up to the Aug. 18 to 21 conference, both municipalities collaborated with each other and the hospital to ensure they were presenting a unified message that “we need that hospital built yesterday,” Coun. Jennifer Kyle told The Spectator in a call Friday.
Another key meeting was with Minister of Agriculture, Food and Agribusiness Rob Flack to advocate for protecting farmland from urban boundary expansions and non-agricultural uses, Oakley said.
The county highlighted the importance of provincial guidance and standardization when it comes to agricultural impact assessments, so the county can “best select the places where we need to have the growth,” while protecting and keeping “the most important farmlands that we have” in production, Kyle said.
The county met with several other ministries, and NDP and Green Party leaders, as part of the South Central Ontario Region Economic Development Corporation (SCOR EDC), which includes Brant, Norfolk, Oxford, Middlesex and Elgin, Oakley said.
One such meeting was in support of the Southwest Community Transit (SCT) network project — an intercommunity transit system that includes Brant Transit — which only has approved government funding until March 2025.
The county spoke to the importance of continuing the program, “as the transit has become critical for members of our shared community,” Oakley said.
As for the impact of the AMO meetings, Kyle said they sometimes lead to followups from a minister. In the case of the hospital, Brantford invited Jones for a visit.
“So hopefully she’ll take us up on that invitation to come and to see the hospital for herself, and to really see the dire need we’re in,” she said.
(Hamilton Spectator, By