Ottawa looks to off-load costly, seldom-used mobile hospitals bought for the pandemic

A field hospital in the parking lot of Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto on Wednesday, March 31, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

OTTAWA — The federal government expects to spend about $7 million this fiscal year to store and maintain four custom-made, portable hospitals that cost taxpayers more than $200 million to buy — facilities meant to bolster overwhelmed hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic that were barely used.

Early on in the pandemic, as the federal government moved at breakneck speed to respond to a global health crisis, it issued rush orders for these Mobile Health Units.

They are deployable field hospitals designed to deal with acute respiratory illness cases and were meant to backstop overflowing hospitals.

But the facilities are now packed away in controlled storage spaces in Brockville and Chesterville, Ont., and the federal government is spending millions of dollars every year to maintain them there.

Documents obtained through the Access to Information Act reveal that off-loading the massive, technically complex structures — which were deployed during the pandemic but saw only a handful of patients — has turned out to be a difficult and slow-moving task.

The same documents also suggest Ottawa has been negotiating agreements to sell or donate the field hospitals since last year, and that GCSurplus, which handles surplus federal government assets, “aims to clear both warehouses by September 2025.”

While cost forecasts for the field hospitals for 2025-26 were redacted from the documents, the federal government has said it expects to spend 12 to 18 months and $8.4 million in maintenance fees to turn the facilities over to new owners.

“Public Services and Procurement Canada is actively pursuing multiple divestment avenues for Mobile Health Unit assets,” department spokesperson Nicole Allen said in an email. “This includes transferring the assets to other federal government departments, selling assets, and donating assets to eligible organizations and other levels of government within Canada.”

The four units take up 588 tractor trailers worth of space and need constant access to electricity to refrigerate medicine. Fully deploying one can take about seven weeks. One of the units takes 75 transport trucks to move — almost as many as pop star Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour.

Documents show PSPC struggled to get speedy approval to get rid of the units — after learning that the obvious places to off-load them already had smaller versions of their own.

“PSPC purposed all opportunities to donate the MHUs, such as working with Global Affairs Canada and National Defence to support situations in places such as Ukraine, Turkey, the Middle East and Libya. The department also received inquiries from municipal governments such as Toronto and Ottawa, to temporarily alleviate homelessness situations,” an internal government memo says.

“In all cases, it was determined that the MHUs did not meet the needs for various reasons, including the size of the units, the high complexity of deployment, the configuration of the equipment, the significant maintenance costs of these units, etc.”

Global Affairs Canada said there was no benefit to keeping the units or donating them to the international arm of the Red Cross. The government said the facilities “would not be practical for international deployments for humanitarian purposes,” according to an internal draft Public Safety slide deck from 2023.

The Canadian Red Cross maintains its own mobile health units, which are smaller and can be deployed quickly, while the Canadian Armed Forces has a 50-bed structure that does not come with an intensive care unit or advanced medical equipment.

Ottawa had allocated up to $300 million for the units at the outset of the pandemic in spring 2020, when it granted two contracts — one to Weatherhaven and another to SNC-Lavalin in a joint venture with Pacific Architects and Engineers — to build them.

Documents said the purchase followed a “limited tendering process” and the firms were chosen because they had made “similar types of structures” for National Defence.

As of Jan. 3, 2024, Ottawa had paid $124.9 million to Weatherhaven Global Resources Inc. and $82.1 million to SNC-Lavalin-PAE to build the units, an internal memo said.

Internal emails show procurement bureaucrats were frustrated because they were stuck managing the structures as their pandemic funding was running out. The units were supposed to be shipped off to another department, such as National Defence or the Public Health Agency of Canada. No other department wanted them.

The Department of Finance told PSPC to try to divest the assets back in October 2022. A year later, on Dec. 18, 2023, the Deputy Minister Emergency Management Committee, which originally endorsed the swift purchase of the health units in 2020, approved a plan to get rid of them.

A departmental memo signed by then-public services minister Jean-Yves Duclos, dated Feb. 27, 2024, declared them surplus and granted GCSurplus approval to sell them at below market value, sell off sub-components or donate them.

One procurement manager in November 2023 said it was “deflating” that it took a year after recommending next steps to get top-level officials to advance the file, only for the project to end up back at “square one” without a divestment plan or the goods declared surplus.

Ottawa ordered two of the units in 2020. Then, in the second wave of the pandemic in 2021, Ontario requested federal permission to use them, so the federal government ordered another two.

The two units dispatched in Ontario were temporarily deployed at Sunnybrook Health Sciences in Toronto and at Hamilton Health Sciences.

Neither one was actually used to deal with critical hospital overflow, federal documents said, although the one at Sunnybrook took in 32 “low-risk” patients, according to a 2021 media report.

Other provinces weren’t interested in requesting them because — according to Duclos’ 2024 memo — the “size (capacity) and design of the units made deployment and takedown complex and too long,” and provinces were short of health-care workers who could operate them.

The oxygen concentration system from one of the units was deployed to Stanton Territorial Hospital in Yellowknife, then was moved to a hospital in Northwest Territories in 2022.

The federal government donated the units’ expiring supplies to schools and moved some of their medical equipment into the National Emergency Strategic Stockpile.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 10, 2025.

Kyle Duggan, The Canadian Press