QEII redevelopment has officially broken ground, but total cost and timeline unknown

Nova Scotia has ceremonially broken ground on an expansion to one of Halifax’s largest health-care centres: the QEII.

First announced in 2016 under the then Liberal government, the QEII Halifax Infirmary expansion looks to increase the size of the emergency room, add operating rooms and create space for more diagnostic imaging.

Speaking in front of a sign reading “More, Faster,” the province announced Wednesday that the long-awaited project won’t be ready before 2030 — almost six years longer than what the Liberal government had pitched.

In December 2022, Tim Houston’s Progressive Conservative government announced it was changing the scope of the project, and that it would cost substantially more, but did not specify how much.

The project was originally slated to cost taxpayers $2 billion.

An auditor general’s report released in April 2023 said the province was falling behind on the project.

When asked, the province would not give a figure on how much the project would cost but said it would be multiple billions of dollars.

Global News asked Nova Scotia Health Authority if the project would be more than $5 billion, in which Dr. Alex Mitchell, vice-president of healthcare infrastructure, replied, “I’m not answering that question.“

1:59 Nova Scotia falling behind on QEII redevelopment project: auditor general

Opposition Liberals called the project “lost in the fog.”

“Well, clearly, it’s not more fast. They just told us a new piece of information, that they’ve cut the building in half from 2,000,000 square feet  to 1,000,000 square feet ,” said Keith Irving, Liberal MLA.

“It shows a complete mismanagement of the project. We don’t have a schedule. We have some date out six years from now. That doesn’t mean very much … We don’t have a design for the building. We got one rendering that they’ve thrown away, but at least two designs.”

The project originally included more than 600 beds, 28 operating rooms, 33 intensive care beds and 15 intermediate care beds.

Instead, today’s plans include 216 beds and 16 operating rooms as part of the expansion.

The primary builder, PCL Construction, expects the years to follow to be challenging for the company, as they try to hire nearly 1,400 employees.

Paul Knowles, the PCL’s vice-president and district manager, said Wednesday that this is one of the largest projects the company has worked on

“Getting security around contracts of this size is difficult. And to get those number of people is difficult,” he said.

“Manpower and supply chain are constantly something that we’re monitoring.”

Victoria General to stay open

According to Health and Wellness Minister Michelle Thompson, slowed expansions to the QEII mean that the Victoria General and the Dickson Center will stay open until after the project is completed.

The minister and the health authority said they want to transfer services from the other facilities.

In April 2016, the province said both the ailing Victoria and Centennial buildings would be fully decommissioned by 2022, and the buildings would have been demolished.

“In the years following 2030, we will be out of the Victoria General and Centennial buildings and have the opportunity to be done with those,” said Dr. Mitchell from Nova Scotia Health.

“The goal is to get out of those buildings confidently into the new one, and then make sure that we’re fully out of those buildings, and at that point, almost certainly make plans to bring them down.”

PCL says that excavation will last the year. The plan is for cranes to start the framework on the building in early 2025.

–With files from Global News’ Alex Cooke