Let's bring blood donation back to Northern BC.

Two Northern Cities. One Story.

Northern British Columbians appreciate how blood has saved the lives of loved ones and friends. Just a few of the stories we've heard include:

An individual from Northwest BC who survived a traumatic car crash and recovered in part thanks to donor blood.
A mom in Vanderhoof whose health is sustained by plasma-based medication.
A mom in Prince George who began hemmoraghing during the birth of her third child, whose life was saved thanks to a massive infusion of blood.

Many people who've received blood as well as their family and friends want to give back. None of them can donate blood or plasma without driving eight hours south, through several regions and over mountains, to Kelowna, the nearest place in British Columbia with a Canadian Blood Services donor centre.

Thunder Bay Ontario used to be in the same situation. Canadian Blood Services closed its donor centre in 2012 and told the city, for over a decade, that reopening was impossible: too remote, too expensive, too small. Then in April 2025, they opened a new plasma centre there anyway. Nothing about the geography changed. What changed was that Canada now imports 70 per cent of its plasma from the United States, and they found a way to make Thunder Bay work.

We’re asking for the same decision in Prince George. This is the fastest-growing city in northern British Columbia, the medical and economic hub for a region that stretches from the Cariboo to the Yukon border, and none of the people in it have a way to give plasma close to home. Every one of them has a neighbour, a parent, a coworker, or a child who has needed a blood product at some point in their life. What is being asked for is not special treatment. It is the same treatment given to a city with the same history, the same distance, and the same case. If it was worth doing in Thunder Bay, it is worth doing here.

Two cities of similar size, similar geography, and similar history. One received the plasma centre it had been asking for. The other is still waiting.

Thunder Bay and Prince George: so many similarities

Thunder Bay and Prince George have always been two versions of the same city. Both sit along long highways and major trading routes. Both are the place people drive to when the hospital in their own town isn't enough. Thunder Bay is the bigger of the two, about 123,000 people to Prince George's 89,490 at the last census. Though, Prince George grew more than twice as fast over those same five years, and Statistics Canada's latest estimate now puts the area past 100,000 for the first time, in line to become the northernmost metropolitan area in the country.

In some ways, Prince George is set up to be a model of excellence in Northern blood donation. It is a major logistical centre. Two highways cross here instead of one, there's a rail line, and the international airport in PG a runway long enough to accommodate the largest of aircraft.

The hospital is a teaching hospital with many specialized services, growing with a $1.6 billion expansion. The Northern Medical Program (UBC-UNBC), UNBC, and the College of New Caledonia graduate physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, and medical laboratory technologists, with programs built for the specific purpose of keeping them in the North. A plasma center is a room with chairs and machines and people trained to run them. This is a city that already trains those people and already keeps them.

Both are also a long way from the labs where donations get tested, though Thunder Bay is the further of the two, some 1,400 kilometres from Brampton and Ottawa, where Prince George is under 800 from the labs in Vancouver and Calgary.

Here's where the two cities stop looking alike. Ontario put plasma centres in its northern cities, Sudbury first, then Thunder Bay. British Columbia put its centres in the south, close enough to the border that you could drive to Washington State faster than most people here can drive to a donation chair. Everything above that line: the Cariboo, the Robson Valley, the Nechako, the Peace, all the way to the Yukon, is empty on the map. A donor in Thunder Bay now walks across a parking lot. A donor in Prince George drives most of a day, and then another back.

BC is 1,200 kilometers long from North to South. The most northerly blood donor centre in the province is Kelowna's plasma donor centre, only 370 kilometers north of the BC-Washington State border. The next closest Canadian Blood Services centres are in Metro Vancouver or Alberta. Map courtesy Andrew Kurjata, CBC News.

Why does Thunder Bay qualify for a donor centre and Northern BC doesn't?

What changed in Thunder Bay wasn't the city. It was the question. For years the question was whether one northern city donated enough to justify the cost, and the answer was no. But Canada has been importing 70 percent of its plasma from the United States, and the question became where the country could find more donors. Under that question, Thunder Bay made sense. Canadian Blood Services says its current centres will get Canada to about a quarter of what it needs, that it wants to reach half, and that demand climbs about 10 percent every year.

We asked Canadian Blood Services to tell us why Thunder Bay qualifies and Prince George doesn't. Their response: While we aim to be transparent about the considerations that guide our decisions, the detailed modelling and assumptions that inform our planning are complex and evolve over time. Providing detailed numerical thresholds and formulas would risk oversimplifying a decision-making process that involves many factors being assessed together.

Despite this, Our Blood Counts is dedicated to returning blood donation to Northern BC. It can and should come from here. We’re already at more than 5,100 individuals asking to be part of the solution.

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Thank you to Our Blood Counts steering committee member and Registered Nurse Ankur Patel who developed this important comparison

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