Now’s the time to decide our city’s future path

When I first came here on a visit in 1998, I fell in love with this town almost immediately. When I moved here in 2000, I saw a town struggling a bit with jobs and an identity, but I saw the potential it had and believed there were brighter days ahead.

Since that time I have seen businesses grow and thrive, a somewhat dreary downtown become brighter, development in the community boom and even some of the resource industries come back on track. I even had the chance to see a decades-long dream of the community come to fruition with the docking of the first large cruise ship at a new terminal. But, for the first time since I drove down Jubilee Parkway to the ocean almost a decade ago, I have a real concern for this town’s future.

I have watched this regional hospital debate since its beginning and I have always felt that it was a good idea. A larger, more well-equipped and staffed hospital, with more specialist and specialized fields than our current hospital, made sense to me, especially with our growing population and age demographic. Sooner or later it would become a necessity.

My preference would have been for the Highway 19/Jubilee Parkway location, but I could have lived with a Dove Creek location, knowing that it would serve both the Campbell River and the Comox Valley equally. The location would have allowed staff a choice of either community to live in and help both communities to continue their growth on equal footing. With the regional district’s recommendation to have the hospital in the Comox Valley and Campbell River’s somewhat disorganized approach in lobbying, I don’t think that this is as much a health care issue for our city anymore, as much as it is about the future of our community as a whole.

If anyone believes that the hospital will now be built anywhere other than the Comox Valley, they need only look at the facts. The Comox Valley has a much larger combined population that will see significant growth in the very near future through developments in the Cumberland and Union Bay areas. They already have more specialists in the area and they have done a very good job of organizing and lobbying for their community. They also have an MLA who sits with the ruling government and is also a minister. If this were a poker game, they are definitely holding close to a full house and our hand is not looking to good. So what do we do?

The fact is we need to get ourselves organized and start making sure that there is a well defined future for our hospital beyond what it is now. When the regional hospital goes into the Comox Valley, it will be all too easy for the government to start cutting back our existing hospital over a period of years to the point of making it into a glorified clinic. One need only look at the Penticton/Kelowna battle in the 60’s and 70’s to see how that turns out.

So, perhaps what we need to do is get together as a community and say to the powers that be, “OK, Government and Health Authority, you have your regional hospital. Now let’s work out the long term future of our hospital and the services it’s going to offer our community as it grows.”

We need to make sure that they understand that the significant downsizing of our hospital puts the future growth and prosperity of our community (and the hard work that went into that growth) in jeopardy. They need to understand that we want our hospital to work in conjunction with a regional hospital and not be just the emergency ward for it. They need to understand that this is about more than just health care. Towns grow around their hospital.

How do we do this? How do we get all of the players to a table in a thoughtful conversation about the big picture. How do we lobby and organize the other communities on the North Island, Quadra and Cortes to understand that there is a benefit to having the Campbell River hospital offer many of its current services with more advanced services being done at the regional hospital? I think we only need to show the history of our community and its hospital to make that point.

Question is, are we as the City of Campbell River, willing to accept a decision that is perhaps already made and work within it, or continue a potentially fruitless fight to the detriment of us all? It will be at least a dozen years before this regional hospital becomes a reality, but now is the time to decide the path that will decide the future of our town. Who knows, we may be able to play this hand to an acceptable break even, rather than going home empty handed.
source:www.campbellrivermirror.com