Calgary General Hospital

The Calgary General Hospital was demolished on October 4, 1998, and its services were transferred to the nearby Peter Lougheed Centre[3] amidst the Klein government's immense cuts to the province's health care system.

Ex-premier Ralph Klein's former chief of staff Rod Love said the facility was "old, dysfunctional and badly organized" and had to be closed if health care was going to be modernized.

Proponents of the demolition argued that the facility was aged and unable to provide efficient service for the money required to operate it, "but the decision left Calgary without an emergency department downtown and destroyed a "state of the art" facility that would (10 years later) be very much in demand".

It is the biggest North American hospital ever to shut down and have its functions, equipment, staff and patients integrated into existing hospitals, and its closure left Calgary as the only large city in Canada without a downtown emergency department.

[3]The hospital comprised numerous buildings constructed over an extended period of time beginning in 1910.