The original St. Paul’s opened on Burrard Street in 1894 and has been running out of building ever since. The replacement is going up 3.5 kilometres east on an 18.4-acre health campus in the False Creek Flats, right beside Pacific Central Station, and it is the largest hospital project currently under construction in Canada.
Project Scope
Eleven storeys of acute care over four levels of underground parking holding 1,170 stalls, roughly 119,807 square metres at a floor space ratio of 3.45 on a 7.4-hectare site. PCL Constructors Westcoast holds the design-build contract at about C$1.7 billion against a C$2.174 billion total project figure, of which the Province of British Columbia committed C$1.327 billion. HDR and Stantec are the architects. Development permit is DP-2021-00085 with the City of Vancouver.
PCL broke ground in March 2021. Construction completion and handover of keys to Providence Health Care were reported for summer 2026, with a full year of activation and commissioning before the hospital opens to patients in 2027. The separate Clinical Support and Research Centre on the same campus follows in early 2029.
We have left the structural, MEP and civil consultants blank because they have not been publicly identified, and the bed count with them. LEED Gold is commonly asserted for BC health facilities but we could not confirm a target for this one, so it stays empty rather than wrong.
Why It Matters
The design-build delivery is the thing to watch. Most Canadian hospitals of this size in the last fifteen years went out as P3s with a concessionaire carrying long-term facilities management. British Columbia put this one out as a straight design-build to a single contractor with the province financing it directly, and it is arriving on a schedule that P3 advocates would have said required a private partner to enforce.
The twelve-month gap between construction completion and patient opening is the part hospital clients keep underestimating, and BC built it into the public timeline from the start rather than discovering it late. Health unions have spent 2026 raising staffing readiness rather than construction readiness, which is roughly where a project of this size wants its public argument to be a year out from opening.
Project Team & Details
| Developer | Providence Health Care |
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| Owner / Client | Providence Health Care with the BC Ministry of Health |
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| Architect | HDR Architecture Associates, Inc. with Stantec Architecture Ltd. |
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| General Contractor | PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc. |
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| Status | Under Construction |
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| Delivery Method | Design-Build |
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| Funding Source | Mixed |
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