Image Credit: CFJC Today / Kent Simmonds

By Jill Sperling

Cancer Clinic

‘We’ve got a ten year plan’: BC government reveals few details about promised cancer clinic in Kamloops

Apr 13, 2021 | 4:35 PM

KAMLOOPS — During the last provincial election campaign, both the Liberal Party and NDP made the promise of a cancer clinic in Kamloops.

Currently, many cancer patients have to travel to Kelowna for specific cancer treatments, such as radiation.

Since elected, the NDP government has been tight-lipped on its plans for the Kamloops clinic, revealing only that planning has begun.

City Councillor and cancer survivor Dale Bass was present when Premier John Horgan announced his intention to build the clinic in Kamloops, but she’s still waiting to see this promise become a reality.

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“As someone who rode that bus between Kamloops and Kelowna for five weeks every day except the weekend, I think I know how desperately we need it,” Bass said. “About 40 per cent of the people who used the cancer clinic for the radiation — because we do have a cancer clinic here, it just doesn’t have radiation are from the Thompson area.”

Health Minister Adrian Dix told CFJC Today the clinic will be built, saying the planning work is starting to happen now.

“We’ve got a ten-year plan,” he said. “Some of that includes capital, which is the building of buildings and services and facilities which will be required to go to that step and some of it is the purchasing of machines and equipment and screening and other things that are placed in various parts of the province.”

Liberal MLA for Kamloops-North Thompson Peter Milobar and Kamloops-South Thompson MLA Todd Stone made their commitment to a cancer clinic prior to the NDP doing the same.

“We made our commitment in this campaign based on information and making sure it was costed in our platform,” Milobar said. “The next day the premier made it as part of an overall provincial cancer announcement, but he was the only one who actually mentioned Kamloops. So, it does have the feeling that it was tagged in and added in at the 11th hour in the middle of an election campaign by the government.”

In February, Milobar and other MLAs sent a letter to the premier and Minister Dix asking questions about the timeline of the project and who would foot the bill.

“Unfortunately, we’ve had zero response to that letter,” Milobar said. “The premier was the one in the election who promised in a four-year time frame that it would be open and operating. Here we are six months later and there’s been very little action and that’s quite disappointing.”

With time ticking away, Bass also wants to see action on this election promise.

“I would really like Minister Dix to recognize the fact that they told us they were going to do this so they would get elected,” she said. “They’re elected, so do it.”