CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Hospital Parking Fees Debate

When Larkfield General Hospital raised its parking rates this spring, few anticipated that the increase would preoccupy city hall for months. Visitors now pay $4 per half hour, to a daily maximum of $26, while employees pay $140 for a monthly pass.

Colin Marchetti, the hospital’s vice-president of finance, defends the increase as regrettable but unavoidable. Parking generates roughly $3 million annually, revenue earmarked for equipment and patient programs that provincial funding leaves uncovered. “If that income vanished, something inside the building would have to give,” he reasons. “Better to inconvenience motorists than lengthen the wait for a diagnostic scan.” Pressed on whether a flat rate is equitable for people who return day after day, he acknowledges that the structure is “a blunt instrument.”

Patient advocate Deborah Ogunleye brands the fees “a levy on misfortune.” The heaviest burden, she contends, lands on those with the least choice: parents of newborns in the neonatal unit, or relatives accompanying a cancer patient through weeks of treatment. Yet she refrains from vilifying administrators, reserving her criticism for a funding model that bills families at their most vulnerable. Her remedy is for the province to cover the shortfall so that the charge disappears entirely.

Councillor Raj Bhandari campaigned on free hospital parking four years ago. A neighbouring municipality cured him of that ambition: within weeks of its hospital scrapping fees, the lot was clogged with downtown office workers, and patients were left circling for spaces. He now advocates a tiered arrangement offering frequent visitors a discounted weekly pass. “The genuine injustice is charging someone who comes daily the same rate as someone who comes annually.”

Nurse Tamsin Leclair, who represents the hospital’s staff, resents a debate framed almost exclusively around visitors. “Many of our nurses work overnight, when the buses have stopped, and that pass consumes a conspicuous share of their take-home pay.” The expense, as she sees it, is landing on precisely the wrong shoulders, although free parking for everyone strikes her as unworkable. She proposes a staff rate scaled to income.

A review is promised for the fall. Marchetti has signalled openness to relief for long-term visitors, provided any discount is offset elsewhere.

Having spent three weeks beside my daughter’s incubator last year, I found this article painfully familiar. Ms. Ogunleye is right that the families who 6. Choose…can least afford a passcome only once a yearmust return dailywork through the night end up paying the most; my own bill passed $400. Even so, I now side with Councillor Bhandari. If a free lot nearby became 7. Choose…a perk for other workersa shelter for overnight nursesa lifeline for anxious parentsa drain on the hospital’s budget, free parking merely trades one problem for another. What galled me was never paying as such but 8. Choose…doing the government’s jobcircling the lot for a spacehaving no say over the moneypaying like a casual visitor; the councillor, at least, has grasped that. Mr. Marchetti’s admission that the system is 9. Choose…a tax on bad lucka rough-and-ready toolunkind to the night shiftshort of what programs need gives me hope for the fall review. And with no buses at three in the morning, nurses deserve what Ms. Leclair seeks: a pass whose price 10. Choose…rises and falls with the paychequematches what visitors payfalls to the governmentvanishes after dark.