MONTREAL- The new CHUM, Centre hospitalier de l’université de Montréal teaching hospital, will be built at a cost of $2.089 billion as a public-private partnership, Treasury Board President Michelle Courchesne announced in Montreal on Monday.
Plans call for selecting the winning PPP consortium by March, with work to begin in June and the opening of the new facility in 2015.
Conditions on financial markets have made it difficult for PPP consortiums to raise money, and as it did with the McGill University Health Centre, the government will pay up front 45 per cent of the cost of the new hospital.
The new CHUM teaching hospital, on the site of the existing downtown St. Luc hospital, will have 772 single-patient rooms, a measure meant to contain to spread of hospital-borne diseases, 39 operating rooms, 51 emergency stretchers and 320 examination rooms.
As well, a new CHUM research centre is being built as a PPP at a cost of $470 million, bringing the CHUM total to $2.559 million. But with the government paying 45 per cent up front, the PPP consortiums will have to raise $1.4 billion.
The McGill teaching hospital has a $2.25-billion expansion program, including $1.3 billion to be raised by its PPP consortium, including $300 million collected by the McGill University Health Centre through a fund-raising drive.
McGill’s new Glen Campus hospital in Notre Dame de Grâce is set to open in 2014, with 500 single-patient rooms and 20 operating rooms.
SNC-Lavalin and Innisfree of London lead the consortium chosen to build the McGill PPP hospital.
McGill’s plan also includes upgrades of its "Mountain Campus," as the Montreal General Hospital will be renamed, with 332 more single-patient rooms and another 79 hospital rooms at the Lachine General, now a McGill hospital.
Courchesne said a panel of experts recommended that the CHUM be built as a PPP, saying this would save the government about $300 million over building it as a conventional project, with the government retaining ownership.
Building the new CHUM as a PPP means the consortium chosen would own and operate the facility for 30 years, with the government paying rent for that period.
The decision to build the CHUM as a PPP was immediately denounced by the Confédération des syndicats nationaux labour federation, whose members include hospital workers.
CSN vice president Louis Roy called on Courchesne to make the experts’ report public, saying keeping it secret sows doubt, and suggesting the panel’s conclusion is not convincing.
"It all looks like the dice were loaded," Roy said in a statement, noting that Courchesne has refused to make the report public, saying it contains "confidential information."
An aide to the minister said the report would be made public, once the contract is signed with the winning consortium.
Roy recalled that Quebec’s auditor general in a June report concluded that the evaluation process in deciding how to build a hospital favoured the PPP choice over conventional construction.
The auditor general said that evaluations for the McGill hospital and the CHUM research centre suggested the work would cost $33.8 million less as a PPP, when in fact building the two projects by the conventional method would save $10.4 million.
Courchesne said the panel of experts took into account the auditor general’s concerns.
Two consortiums, Innisfree-Axor-OHL-Dalkia and Accès Santé CHUM, which includes Montreal’s Axor Group, for the construction portion, and a subsidiary of HSBC, for the financing, are bidding to build the new CHUM.
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