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SEPTEMBER 27, OCTOBER 11 & 18
Eby promises patient tower if re-elected B.C. NDP leader makes announcement at Beban Park campaign event Sept. 26 GREG SAKAKI AND JESSICA R. DURLING NEWS BULLETIN
Olympic gold-medallist hammer thrower Ethan Katzberg is swarmed by young fans as he carries the Canadian national flag around Rotary Bowl stadium on Thursday, Sept. 26. (Chris Bush/News Bulletin)
Gold medallist comes home to hero’s welcome KARL YU NEWS BULLETIN
A golden boy from Nanaimo returned to the city where he grew up to celebrate his Olympic triumph. Ethan Katzberg won Canada’s first gold medal in hammer throw at the
2024 Summer Games in Paris with a throw of 84.12 metres Aug. 4. He was honoured in the Harbour City on Thursday, Sept. 26, first at an assembly at John Barsby Secondary School, his alma mater, and then at a community event at Rotary Bowl stadium.
The Olympian said Barsby helped him build a good foundation for his athletic career and the numerous sports he played all contributed in some way to becoming an Olympian. “Oh, man, I did everything I could,” Katzberg said. “Basketball, cross-country, track and
field at John Barsby – I did some football too. All the fun lunch-time volleyball tournaments, all that good stuff. I wanted to do it all and eventually, I siphoned everything out and decided to do the hammer throw, and kind of took it from there.” Continued on A35
The NDP has made a significant election campaign promise to voters in Nanaimo, committing to a new patient tower at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital. B.C. NDP leader David Eby made the announcement at the start of a town hall Sept. 26, at the Beban Park Social Centre. “And we’re going to make sure that we’re building the housing and we’re training the health-care workers so that that facility is going to have the staff that it needs to deliver for people,” he said. “On the physical facility side, we’re building up Nanaimo. We’ve got the cancer centre, we’ve got the ICU, we’ve got the patient tower, we’re going to have the surgical rooms, all of that work to make sure that the space is there so that the people in Nanaimo get the care that they need.”
He acknowledged that there’s additional work to do on improving health care in Nanaimo, mentioning the need for a cardiac catheterization lab, and said his party intends to keep working toward improvements. Eby didn’t announce an expected cost of a patient tower, but Nanaimo’s Fair Care Alliance advocacy group has estimated the price tag at $1.7 billion. Generally, provincial governments direct 60 per cent of funding for capital projects for health-care facilities and hospital districts raise the other 40 per cent through tax requisition. “It really matters to have a local community that is prioritizing this project and stepping up to partner with us on it and it’s definitely a factor in making these decisions,” Eby said. Continued on A6
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