Niagara residents owe Don Alexander a vote of thanks for his clear and unequivocal arguments against the choice of the west-end site for the new St. Catharines hospital complex.

Since the west-end site poses so many serious problems, one wonders why this choice was made by the NHS, and then endorsed by Niagara Region. In fact, the site study was unavailable to Niagara Region councillors when they approved the project. Finally released well after the deal was done, that site study did not take the existing Ontario and Queenston Street locations into consideration at all, nor any other central site that might have been at all suitable.

In the recent media release from the NHS, Debbie Sevenpifer comments on the poor infrastructure in the downtown core. If this is intended as a rationale against a centrally-located hospital, it fails to explain how the present sites continue to function with the current infrastructure. In actual fact, as Mr. Alexander has shown, it is the proposed west-end site that will create infrastructure problems that will cost taxpayers many millions of dollars to solve.

It would appear that no alternative to the west-end location was ever to be taken into serious consideration. In other words, that site was chosen to fit the requirements of the public-private partnership model that Infrastructure Ontario refers to as an AFP (alternative financing project). These projects generally demand a pristine or clear site. Yet a May 2008 report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (www.policyalternatives.ca) shows that these AFPs have all the problems of the Public-Private Partnership (P3) model that has proved such a disaster in Britain, Australia and here in Canada, most recently in Brampton. Indeed, the CCPA report calls for "an immediate and indefinite moratorium on Ontario Infrastructure AFP projects in the hospital sector".

The two issues -- site and funding model -- are inextricably linked. Now that MPP Kim Craitor has been successful in calling for review of the NHS, perhaps it is not too much to hope that the decision to build the hospital as a public-private partnership, and the choice of the west-end location, will be investigated.

Fiona McMurran, Welland