UCP win halts AHS ‘super lab’ construction

Province stops super lab construction The UCP will review the AHS super lab project in south Edmonton. CTV Edmonton’s Nicole Weisberg reports.

Construction on Alberta Health Services’ $590-million lab at the University of Alberta’s south campus has been put on hold.

The province stopped construction to allow the incoming UCP government to review the project.

“To minimize costs incurred before a new government has the opportunity to review the lab hub project, a decision has been made to pause construction,” an Alberta infrastructure representative told CTV News in an email.

Premier-designate Jason Kenney has called the project—plans for which were announced by the NDP government in 2016, and allocated budget dollars in 2017—“unnecessary,” and promised to scrap it if elected.

The lab would bring existing laboratories and staff under one roof to process the more than 30 million tests conducted in the province every year.

However, Kenney has said the project “will do nothing to improve patient services.”

The UCP would prefer to spend $640 million on a hospital in south Edmonton.

“This is money that could be going directly to patient care instead, and that’s why we will immediately need to cancel this reckless and inexcusably wasteful expenditure," the party said in a recent news release.

PCL is the lab's contractor.