Protests stop groundbreaking on Montreal superhospital

It was announced last week that a consortium led by Montreal-based SNC-Lavalin will be designing and building one of two long-awaited “super-hospitals” in Montreal. The English-speaking McGill University Hospital Centre is a $1.34-billion P3 project to be constructed on the site of the former Glen rail yards in the Notre-Dame-de-Grace district. SNC-Lavalin is in a consortium with British company Innisfree Ltd. for the project, which will start construction almost immediately and will be completed in 2014.
A planned ground-breaking ceremony for Thursday, April 1 was abandoned after protestors arrived objecting to the fact that the English language superhospital was scheduled to be completed before the French-language super-hospital, the Centre hospitalier de l’Universite de Montreal.
Plans for the hospitals were first announced in 2001.