QEII Health Centre redevelopment project still in design stage, says minister responsible

It's been nearly a year since the Houston government unveiled its "more, faster" plan to improve health-care services in the province, but reworking the design and shifting away from the course charted by the previous Liberal government appears to be much harder than anticipated.

On Thursday, the cabinet minister responsible for the project, Colton Leblanc, told reporters the work to replace aging and antiquated facilities at the province's largest hospital, the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre, remains firmly on the drawing board.

"We had hoped to be able to start early works this summer, that didn't happen," said Leblanc.

That work was to have included "site surveying, blasting preparation and construction office setup."

Instead, the project remains focused on coming up with a design that incorporates all the changes the Houston government has demanded since coming to office in the fall of 2021.

"We are focused on designing, every single day, designing like hell," said the minister responsible for health-care redevelopment. "We're looking at a significant, massive footprint of a project.

"This is not a two-bedroom bungalow!"

Ongoing delays 

Last Dec. 15, the province announced it was "in the final stages of concluding an agreement" with Plenary PCL Health to build a new patient tower at the Queen Elizabeth II. Five month later, on May 12, the PC government announced construction on the new hospital was "set to begin."

"Today is an excellent example of how we are delivering on our plan to do more and go faster as we do whatever it takes to fix healthcare," LeBlanc said at the time.

A month ago, the government hit pause on plans to demolish the hospital's main parkade to make way for a new acute care tower. 

"I would not get hung up on demolishing a parkade," said Leblanc. "The parkade can be demolished relatively quickly."

The minister did not pinpoint what triggered the ongoing delays other than to reiterate the scale of the project and its complexity.

"We need to know what we're building and exactly how we're building," he said. "It is the largest infrastructure project of our province's history, one of the largest in the country."

Asked for a new timeline for the start of construction, Leblanc responded, "We haven't set an exact timeline on construction." 

Zach Churchill, the leader of the Nova Scotia Liberal Party and one-time health minister, couldn't believe the project hadn't moved off the drawing board.

"I mean, that's shocking," said Churchill. "This is a plan that was given to them on a silver platter and they've done nothing but delay this, and not execute on building new hospitals and expanding room capacity at our hospitals in Nova Scotia."

"And the fact that they can't even answer these basic questions, I think is very concerning."

NDP Leader Claudia Chender was baffled by Leblanc's explanations.

"I can't make heads or tails of why this is taking so long," said Chender. " And ultimately I think it does a huge disservice to Nova Scotians.

"It really casts a lot of doubt on this idea that this is the government that's fixing health care, because health care is suffering and the people who need to access it in the region's largest centre are suffering as well."

Leblanc said the plan remains to move ahead with this project as quickly as possible.

"We're still focused on moving as fast as we can," he said. "But we also have a responsibility of making sure that we get this right."