MONTREAL – For Kathy Nakaskima, the Provigo project is a sign of hope that no parent will have to go through her experience.
Her six-year-old son Justin was a long-term patient at the Montreal Children’s Hospital.
“Parents try to be here as much as possible with their children, but you have to go home, you have to shower, you have to change,” she said.
“The worst thing is on more than one occasion when I had to rush home to do that, I got calls from the hospital saying Justin was in respiratory failure and I had to rush back to the hospital.”
She is an adamant supporter of the Provigo project, which will bring a grocery store, senior’s residences, condos and apartments for families with sick children to within steps of the MUHC.
The project has been controversial in the area because of traffic concerns, something Nakaskima thinks is trivial when compared to the life-and-death situations.
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“No one knows what a traffic concern is until you’re sitting in that cab, desperate to get back to your child who might be dying at that very moment,” she said.
Traffic has already been a hot-button issue in the neighbourhood.
READ MORE: NDG residents along de Maisonneuve brace for more construction
With multiple major construction projects, NDG has been littered with orange cones.
“The residents in the neighbourhood are very fearful,” admitted NDG city councillor Peter McQueen.
“I understand that and I sympathize. It’s been quite a five years in NDG with the construction of the super hospital, the MUHC traffic plan and especially the Turcotte. Saint-Jacques is down, there’s a lot of extra traffic here on de Maisonneuve.”
Wednesday, the NDG borough council voted five to one in favour of the project.
This is despite being presented with a petition of nearly 300 signatures by residents who are against the project, claiming it’s taking the traffic situation from bad to worse.
READ MORE: Proposed new building comes free of charge for hospital foundation
“Traffic is going to be an issue. It already is an issue right now,” one resident told Global News.
“We’re going to have a lot of truck traffic for the building. It’s going to be a disaster for our neighbourhood,” said another passerby.
The project isn’t a done deal yet; there still needs to be a third reading of the zoning change at council.
Residents could then force a referendum.
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