This just doesn't instill any confidence that the hospital could handle any sort of a natural disaster or large accident. Cell phones should never be counted as back up as the cell towers have limited emergency power as well and have other issues.

Lots of luck with Telus...
I have been waiting over 6 months
for them to help me with an ongoing issue

The hospital will get priority service from Telus. They do not have to wait.

The two problems of the electrical system and telephone system are an indication that old infrastructure needs some attention.

When there is insufficient money from government to fully fund services there is a tendency to take money from maintenance, cleaning and other support services and put it into hiring another nurse, or doing another surgery, or buying another expensive piece of equipment. Eventually, of course, that catches up with you and you get problems as the systems deteriorate. Now it costs much more.

So who do we hold responsible, an administration that doesn't budget enough for infrastructure upkeep or a government that doesn't give enough money to pay for what is necessary?

Well if the management is taking money from the infrastructure maintenance fund and spends it on nursing and equiptment, isn't that fraudulent use of funds?

They are given a bunch of money and told to run the service with it. How they spend it is their decision, but they are not "allowed" to go over the (2 year) budget. If they spend it on one thing (providing medical services) they can't spend it on other things (cleaning floors, painting walls, upgrading telephone wires). Fraud doesn't come into it since they decide how much goes into the "funds" (departmental budgets).

I suspect that the operative word is cutbacks. We never did hear what the official cause of the power outage last month was. Heard lots of spin at the time but still no explanation.