If you are among the thousands of people out there rallying and petitioning over the future of our hospital services -- especially if you are among those in central and southern areas of the region who believe that the one and only new hospital complex the province is likely to fund for Niagara for decades to come should be located somewhere closer to the centre of our region rather than in a far off corner of west St. Catharines -- then here is a message for you.

Back off!

That's right. Tear up your petitions and go home. You might just as well sit in front of your television sets watching reruns of Let's Make A Deal than go to any more public meetings over Niagara Health System's (NHS) plans for delivering hospital services across our region.

That's pretty much the message from St. Catharines' deputy mayor Peter Secord to the rest of Niagara.

"Back off, boys," Secord was quoted saying in a St. Catharines daily newspaper last Saturday. "This is our hospital."

"Boys" apparently refers to mayors and any other municipal representatives in communities outside of St. Catharines who have the audacity to call for the new hospital to be in a more central site in the region where everyone from Wainfleet, Port Colborne and Fort Erie to Welland, Pelham, Niagara Falls and, yes, even St. Catharines, Thorold and Niagara-on-the-Lake, has equal access to it.

But never mind that.

Despite an ongoing review by the province of NHS's so-called "hospital improvement plan," the province has apparently already decided that the new hospital is going in west St. Catharines whether the rest of the region likes it or not.

No matter that it will also house first-of-a-kind cancer and cardiac treatment centres for Niagara and, according to the plan the province directed the NHS to make public this summer, all maternity and an increasing number of other vital services will go there. No matter that maternity, emergency and other services in other hospitals across our region would be eliminated or downsized.

We've got Secord saying "back off," and at a recent public meeting on NHS's hospital plan, we had the city's mayor, Brian McMullan, calling the new hospital complex St. Catharines' "local hospital."

That despite the fact that we are talking about a hospital complex that constitutes the most expense infrastructure project on the planning board for our region at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars -- a cost residents across this region, whether they live in St. Catharines, Fort Erie, Niagara Falls or Wainfleet, may find themselves paying handsomely for many years to come through their property taxes.

One can understand why Secord and McMullan, for purely parochial reasons, want this new complex in their municipality. What's sad is that the province, which we should count on to look beyond parochial interests, seems prepared to approve the west St. Catharines site, even before the review of NHS's plan is completed.

"There are no plans at this time to delay construction of the project," Paulette den Elzen, a spokesperson for the province's infrastructure ministry, told me earlier this week. She then deferred to Jim Bradley, St. Catharines MPP and the province's transportation minister, who was recently quoted saying the NHS "will go ahead with the hospital" at the St. Catharines site.

So why are we going through this farce of a public review where the NHS and the province are telling us the hospital restructuring plan and the new hospital complex and where it's located are two separate issues?

It's like saying let's do a review of our solar system that looks at the planets but leaves the sun out.

So if the fix is in, if the new hospital is going to be a "local hospital" for the St. Catharines area instead of a regional hospital many Niagara residents, including doctors and other health care workers across this region, want to see located at a more central site, let St. Catharines pay for it.

Why should residents in Fort Erie, Port Colborne, Niagara Falls and elsewhere pay for something St. Catharines' deputy mayor wants them to "back off" from? Why should they pay for the multi-millions of dollars worth of roadwork and other infrastructure, including the public transit needed to accommodate the new hospital at the west St. Catharines site when the hospital could be located at a site in Niagara where the costs are more sustainable for all the region's residents?

Perhaps residents in other parts of the region should back off completely by exercising an option some have already floated -- to break away from the NHS and establish a hospital system that meets the needs of residents in central and south Niagara.

* * *

Doug Draper can be reached at drapers@vaxxine.com.