Mayor Glenn Andersen has been living in St. Paul for 26 years and during that time, the issue of an outdated and non-wheelchair accessible medical clinic has come up again and again, he says. It was not until recently that the Town of St. Paul and the County of St. Paul pulled together to see if they could access the funding to supply the community and its doctors with a clinic in which everyone could take pride.
On Feb. 11, Minister of Infrastructure Ray Danyluk officially announced that the province would support the project with $2.5 million, to add to the Town and County’s separate contributions of $1 million each. It was another step in cementing what is already a pretty impressive partnership, involving the town, the county, the province, the doctors and the developer who has donated serviced land for the project.
Danyluk, along with Andersen and Reeve Steve Upham, has since put the ball in the federal government’s court to join the partnership and support the project. For his part, local MP Brian Storseth said he is putting his efforts into accessing Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) funding, on the premise that First Nations people will be using the proposed medical clinic.
But support for the project from local First Nations communities isn’t solid. Tribal Chiefs Ventures has yet to write a letter of support for the project, while Saddle Lake Chief Eddy Makokis has said chief and council are interested in getting the reserve its own medical centre.
In an ideal world, communities, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, would co-operate and agree to jointly support one medical clinic that would serve the needs of the region. That would truly be a landmark partnership, making that project a stellar example across the country.
However, in the less than ideal world that we do live in, municipalities and reserves have their own interests and want to protect services for their own communities. That’s understandable, but it will make Storseth’s job more difficult if his focus is exclusively on INAC funding for St. Paul’s medical clinic.
Storseth has stressed again and again that funding health care is not the federal government’s responsibility. That is true, but this project is broader in scope – it is about providing a facility for various kinds of health services, a “one-stop medical wellness centre,” as MLA Ray Danyluk has called it.
Secondly, the federal government might not typically fund health services, but the province, the Town of St. Paul and the County of St. Paul could make the same case, and say they aren’t usually in the business of supplying an office space for professionals. But in this case, Danyluk, Andersen and Upham all agree that enough is enough, that St. Paul has cried out for decades for the need for a new medical centre without resulting in even a fraction of the effort that is being expended on this project today.
Saying the federal government is not responsible for funding health care is to sidestep a responsibility to the community that other local politicians have taken on and championed to the collective tune of $4.5 million, with the project estimated to cost up to $6 million.
The MP’s efforts on file can hopefully close the gap in funding and ensure this long-awaited project can finally go ahead.
