Costs appear to be rising for The Ottawa Hospital's new Civic campus

Costs appear to be rising for the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus. The city was told four years ago that the province would shell out $2.1 billion for the project and the municipal government would need to chip in $150 million. Now the infrastructure minister is suggesting a much higher price tag. Elise Skura has been following this story and joins me now. Elise, it feels like we've been spending years talking about how the hospital will pay for this project. Now, what's the latest? You're so right that this has been a very long-standing issue, but the idea of ballooning costs came up at Queen's Park this week. The liberal infrastructure critic pushed the minister for an update, and things got a bit testy. See this government, they see incredible investments that are being made to put their members to work. Madam Chair, what is the cost of the Ottawa Hospital project, the Civic Hospital project at Dows Lake? How much is it going to cost? So again, through you, Chair, the investments that we're making that are putting members to work right now on an investment of just shy of $10 billion towards the hospital. That answer got Blake concerned, since the province says it will only pay for 90% of the project. The rest will land on the city. So how do you justify a 5x increase in costs? It's an increase in costs, as I talked about, supply chains, etc. Also, municipally imposed fees, which increases, increases the relative share. That's your answer. And so we're working collaboratively with them, and we'll continue to invest. The minister there mentioning a $10 billion spend. What do we now know about the total cost of the project and where it stands? So for that, let's start back in 2022, because that's when we first got a price tag. It was meant to cost $2.8 billion, with $2.1 billion coming from the province. The city was told to look for $150 million. The project was supposed to be under construction two years later. But fast forward to now and here's the location. Crews there only preparing the site. The Ottawa hospital told us in an email it could not comment on how much the project will cost or tell us exactly when it would be finished. It says the design is complete but construction contracts still need to be issued and costs and the timeline still need to be finalized. I also turned to the health minister's office. It refused to comment on the 10 billion dollar figure at all saying only To date, we have invested over $30 million to support the planning of the new Ottawa hospital. And that statement, almost word for word, what we heard from the ministry in April, the city says it's still looking for the original $150 million. Four years later, no word on when staff will be able to report back to councillors. Here's what the mayor said about this issue earlier today. If the cost of the project has gone up, then that's a question for the Ministry of Health. The City of Ottawa is not going to cover billions and billions of dollars of additional costs for the hospital. That's not our jurisdiction. Now there is one more funding source. Here, the Ottawa Hospital Foundation has been raising money for the project. It told CBC it's so far gotten $400,000 and we'll have another update soon. Thank you for this, Elise. The CBC's Elise Skura reporting for us.