Ottawa hospital, Infrastructure Ontario reviewing LRT inquiry recommendations ahead of P3 hospital build

Officials with The Ottawa Hospital and Infrastructure Ontario are carefully reviewing the final report of the Ottawa Light Rail Transit Public Inquiry as the construction of a new hospital, built through a public-private partnership, looms closer.

“There is no question the final report on the LRT is being reviewed by both us and Infrastructure Ontario to make sure whatever learnings came from that are built into this progressive design-build model process,” said hospital President and CEO Cameron Love.

The new Civic campus of The Ottawa Hospital — the biggest health-care infrastructure project in the city’s history — will be designed and built via a public-private partnership (P3) model, which Infrastructure Ontario says it uses for “large, complex public infrastructure projects.

“Public-private partnerships leverage the expertise and competitiveness of the private sector to successfully expand, modernize and replace Ontario’s aging infrastructure.”

Love says the hospital will be the crown jewel of health care in Ottawa when it is complete.

Public-private partnerships were not the main focus of the Ottawa LRT inquiry. It looked at construction delays, reliability issues and technical and service failures that have marred the construction and operation of the Ottawa LRT system’s main line. The commission was tasked with making recommendations aimed at preventing the issues from happening again.

But the final report also made some recommendations about P3s, including that collaboration should be at the heart of public-private partnerships, and that all private-sector stakeholders should be required to acknowledge they are working in the public interest — and that should be a core organizational principle of P3 projects. It also emphasized timely and transparent oversight, among other things.

It concluded that the use of a P3 model had a mixed impact on the project, but noted that the model helped reduce risk to the city.

P3s involve public infrastructure for which the private sector assumes a share of the risks, from design and planning to long-term maintenance.

Last week, requests for proposals were released seeking competitors for the hospital’s Civic campus project. Once they’re selected, design work will begin.

The new hospital is expected to be open in 2028 or 2029. It will likely cost well over $2.8 billion, a figure that will have to be reevaluated later in the process when the impacts of inflation and cost escalation are better known, said Love.

Work is already underway on the parking garage being built on the site, along Carling Avenue near Dow’s Lake, and site preparation where the hospital will eventually be built will soon begin. The site of the hospital is the former location of the Sir John Carling office tower.

Details of the final project have already been approved by the province. That includes its size and scope, including the number of beds, operating rooms and departments. It will include a rooftop helipad, a state-of-the-art trauma centre and individual patient rooms, among other features.

Designs will be finalized during the next phase, Love said, after which costs and a construction schedule will be confirmed.

Construction of the hospital, to replace the aging Civic located on Carling and Parkdale avenues, has been marked by controversy with a site first being selected across from the current hospital and later rejected. The project’s use of green space, including a parking garage in a former park near Dow’s Lake, has raised the ire of greenspace advocates, neighbours and others.

Love said the project is “one of the most exciting things we have ever done in health care in the city.

“We have a very large plan for how we want to rebuild health care,” he said.

“This will be a new civic crown jewel for health care in this city.”

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