The Thompson-Nicola Regional District has approved spending up to $75,000 towards an advocacy campaign for the Kamloops cancer care centre.

Thompson Regional Hospital District Board Chair Mike O’Reilly says the goal of the campaign is to keep the pressure on the provincial government, noting the facility is long overdue.

“As a board collectively we thought ‘hey, you know what, we need to look at doing something different’ because what we’ve doing for the better part of three decades has not worked,” O’Reilly said, on NL Newsday.

“We can only do so much [as a board] but collectively there’s about 150,000 people that we represent. We think those 150,000 voices are going to be a lot louder and stronger that just ours.”

O’Reilly says the campaign is expected to begin before the end of this year and last about 10 months.

“We’ve got a tight window between now and next fall when the next provincial election is when there will be things handed out and approved by government,” O’Reilly said. “We have been given announcements for three decades but success is when this actually happens.”

“That being said, if this does not happen between now and the next provincial election, the advocacy campaign won’t stop on election day. This advocacy campaign will stop once there is a shovel in the ground.”

While there have been promises for a Kamloops cancer care centre with radiation treatment from former premiers Mike Harcourt in 1991, and John Horgan in 2020, the TNRD’s External Relations and Advocacy Advisor, Corbin Kelley, says this advocacy campaign will be “non-political” in nature.

Kelley says it would focus on the benefits of having radiation treatment at Royal Inland Hospital, adding to diagnostics and chemotherapy services currently available in Kamloops.

“It has been determined that a public advocacy campaign has worked previously for Kamloops (UCC to TRU, West Jet to YKA), and a similar campaign would help build momentum at a local level to demonstrate the need for a cancer centre to be built in Kamloops,” Kelley said, in a report to the TNRD board.

“It is understood by staff that approximately 40 per cent of patients receiving radiation treatment at [Kelowna General Hospital] are residents of the Thompson-Cariboo-Shuswap Health Service Delivery Area. Having radiation treatment at RIH would allow regional residents to receive this treatment much closer to home.”

In May, Health Minister Adrian Dix said the Kamloops cancer care centre was expected to be open by 2027. Dix also said that a business case for the facility – which could cost between $200 million to $300 million – was also expected to be approved sometime this fall.

“This is a significant day,” Dix said of the Kamloops announcement. “There are always discussions in these projects about then when’s and the how’s but I have passionately believed that we need to distribute cancer care services around the province.”

“This is why we are building and are in the process of building four new cancer centres, here in Kamloops and three other communities [Burnaby, Surrey, and Nanaimo], to provide care closer to home and to meet the significant increase in demand for care that we see.”