Crossed out: About the cancelled hospital at Kenmount Crossing 

Taking all the politics and curious real estate backstory out of it, the proposed site for a new hospital in the St. John’s area made sense. 

Kenmount Crossing, as it’s called, nears the end of Kenmount Road in St. John’s — or it could be at the beginning, if you’re driving into the city. Three decades or so ago, when I lived in Paradise, all of that land was the woods, the trees you drove past as you went to work or the movies. 

It’s all getting filled in now, and the land is between rapidly growing subdivisions from each direction, with industrial and commercial development thrown in there too. The proposed hospital site would have linked to the Trans-Canada Highway through the Outer Ring Road, and would put acute health care much closer to a bigger and growing population. 

The new Progressive Conservative government has put the kibosh on the hospital plan. Health Minister Barry Petten on Wednesday said the government simply cannot afford the pricey $10-bilion bill of developing a new hospital from scratch, and will instead renovate St. Clare’s Hospital near downtown St. John’s.

Petten blasted the former Liberals for “photo op announcements” from the former Liberals, and claimed there was no planning for the new hospital.

As Terry Roberts reported for Here & Now in the video below, that didn’t go over well with the Liberals, who said the plan was to pay for the infrastructure with money from the proposed Churchill Falls deal with Quebec — and the MOU for that is now under review by the PCs, as well. (As for the prior government’s planning, it’s hard not to think of counted chickens and unhatched eggs.)

Back to the photo-op announcement stinger … and back to early November 2024.

That’s when then-premier Andrew Furey, three mayors and some ministers gathered out at Kenmount Crossing to announce the hospital plan.

Furey, who was less than four months from calling the time on his own job as premier, was bullish about the plan, which he said would not only replace St. Clare’s but furnish the province with a more modern facility. (There was no surprise about St. Clare’s, by the way; the government had announced four years earlier that the aging hospital needed to go.)

One element of that announcement was a donation of 10 acres of land by a consortium called H3, made of the Hickman companies and developer Glenn Hickey.

Later, though, we learned the donation was woven into a $23-million deal to buy 54 acres of land from H3, which made me think of a rebate or some other incentive you get at a car dealer. You know, buy 54 acres, get the next 10 free …

And, it got more interesting. As my former colleague Beth Whitten uncovered, the former Liberal government was basically buying back land it sold to H3 about eight years earlier … at a third of the cost it was now prepared to pay.

The Hickman family has long had close ties to the Liberals, right up through Furey’s leadership campaign. These are facts well known to PCs, and I can’t help but wonder how much of the calculus for Wednesday’s decision involved political unease.

There are still reverberations for the decision. Paradise Mayor Patrick Martin said he was “completely shocked by the news,” which is a blow to the town in a few ways. Also scrapped was a nearby recreation centre that would have served several communities, including his own, and the project would also have provided highway access that would no doubt have eased traffic problems in the town.

An argument could be made that Premier Tony Wakeham is buying some more time with critical decisions on health care. A former administrator himself, he will understand infrastructure. He campaigned on improving health services, and even with fierce fiscal problems, merely extending the life of St. Clare’s is not going to resolve persistent problems in acute care.