No gift is too small when regular folk rally around a big idea.
That’s what happened in 1954 when residents staged a community fundraising blitz to build the South Peel Hospital, the first to serve the residents of Port Credit, Clarkson, Lorne Park, Erindale, Streetsville and Malton.
Over 1,500 volunteers, many of them nurses, went door-to-door, asking people to donate what they could. Their goal: to raise $150,000 in two weeks. That’s the equivalent of about $1.7 million in today’s dollars.
The fundraising appeal became a true community event. Over 50 organizations stepped up to participate, and it attracted support from young and old.
There was $62 from the Cooksville Lawn Bowling Club. Mrs. Sicinski delivered a $100 cheque from Branch 26 of the Polish Alliance. So did the student committee of Central Public School in Lakeview, and the women’s alliance of Cooksville United Church gave $100, raised through their bazaars and bake sales.
Service station owner Jim Wylie of Clarkson donated all his Saturday profits – $200 – to the campaign. When asked why he had given so generously he cited a car accident he had witnessed in front of his business on Lakeshore Road.
“That little girl was taken by ambulance to Oakville-Trafalgar Memorial hospital but they didn’t have room to treat her and she had to be taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Toronto. We need that hospital out here.”
And Port Credit High School students raised $300 by selling ribbons, tickets to their Mardi Gras dance and some of the girls took part in a charity auction with the –umm, lucky fellas – being treated to lunch the next day.
There was even a play created, called ‘Babies Can’t Wait’, written by Mrs. Evelyn Crickmore of Erindale and produced by Mrs. Helen Kendall of Port Credit.
The door-to-door canvassing blitz raised $168,260.60.
Another $200,000 came from the provincial and federal governments, $87,000 from local businesses and $12,000 from the sale of 22 acres along Upper Middle Road.
Citizens approved municipal debentures, including $15,000 from the Town of Streetsville, $110,000 from the Town of Port Credit and just over $1 million from Toronto Township.
A screenshot of a commercial that ran on TV in support of the South Peel Hospital. (photo courtesy of Trillium Health Partners)
Local people had been lobbying for their own hospital since the 1940s but the campaign became more urgent in 1952 after a 16-year-old had died while enroute to a Toronto hospital.
At the time, Port Credit and Toronto Township residents existed in a no-man’s land of hospital services.
Toronto’s St. Joseph’s Hospital was located 18 kilometres east, Oakville Trafalgar Hospital was 19 kilometres to the west, and Peel County Memorial, was 21 kilometres north.
“The need for the new hospital has been emphasized over and over again,” said former Ontario premier and hospital board honourary chair Thomas Laird Kennedy.
“The good people of South Peel know the seriousness of the situation and I believe they will greet the canvassers generously.”
Builders broke ground at the corner of Highway 10 and Upper Middle Road, now The Queensway on Friday the 13th, April 1956 with 44 students from every school in South Peel invited to participate.
Almost two years later – on May 4th, 9,000 people showed up for the grand opening of their new $2 million, five-storey, 125-bed hospital.
On May 19th, 18-year-old Anne Beatty became patient #1.
According to the Toronto Star, which documented the event, she “rode from her home to the hospital in the ambulance of G.F. Skinner, one of the charter members of the board.”
She was there to have her tonsils out.
South Peel was renamed the Mississauga Hospital on January 1, 1970; the same day Toronto Township became the Town of Mississauga.
An artist’s rendering of the new Peter Gilgan Mississauga Hospital, part of the largest health infrastructure project in Ontario history. (photo courtesy of Trillium Health Partners)
Fast forward to 2024 and health care is front and centre once again with the announcement that Trillium Partners is building the $2-billion Trillium HealthWorks to serve the people of present-day Mississauga.
At the corner of Hurontario and Dundas, Ontario’s largest hospital, the Peter Gilgan
Mississauga Hospital is being built, including Ontario’s first Women’s and Children’s Hospital, which will span two floors of the Mississauga Hospital.
A new Seniors Campus of Care on Speakman Drive in Mississauga is under construction, beginning with long-term care homes, operated by Partners Community Health, a new not-for-profit organization.
Finally, the Gilgan Family Queensway Health Centre, which will specialize in complex continuing care and rehabilitation services, is being built on the other side of Etobicoke Creek, on land once part of the village of Dixie.
All this to serve a current population of over a million people in Mississauga and West Toronto, over half of whom were born outside Canada, with over a million more people expected to move into the area by 2041.
Trillium HealthWorks is the largest health infrastructure renewal project in Canada’s history.
It’s all about people caring for people, just as it was in the 1950s
You can hear more stories about the people and events that helped shape Mississauga via our podcast, We Built This City: Tales of Mississauga, available on your favourite podcast platform or from our website.