NDP's Bruce Ralston says province's desperation is showing in latest health-care claims

NDP finance critic Bruce Ralston says the provincial Liberal government's claim that his party is set against private-public partnerships is off the mark.

The Surrey-Whalley MLA dismisses the charge as "desperate."

"The government is really scrambling," he said. "The public find them arrogant and out of touch."

The issue was raised when B.C. Health Minister George Abbott called on provincial NDP leader Carole James and her party to "come clean" on that party's plans for the construction of new hospitals after B.C. Federation of Labour Jim Sinclair reportedly called for a moratorium on P3s.

If such a thing were to happen, Abbott argued, major health-care projects would be at risk.

"The Carole James NDP is the political arm of the B.C. Federation of Labour," Abbott remarked. "They share members, they share resources and they share the same shadowy ambition to pull our province back into the 1990s where no new hospitals were built and patients paid the price."

Abbott listed, among the projects he said could be at risk, the $239 million new Surrey Outpatient Hospital.
While Ralston says he doesn't advocate "a blanket moratorium on all P3 projects in existence," he noted that they are not without risk either. He cited as an example the proposed Surrey Outpatient Hospital, which he said is financed through a bank in Dublin, which is a subsidiary of another bank in Germany that was recently bailed out by the German government.

"If the financing falls through, it may cause a further delay," Ralston warned. "The bloody Surrey hospital's been delayed long enough."

If P3 financing fell apart in the Surrey project, he added, the government has to step in the complete the work.
As for the comments attributed to Sinclair, he added, "Jim Sinclair is speaking for himself."