Manitoba’s NDP government’s first budget promises to restore a health-care system that’s currently delivering long wait times for ER and diagnostic services, delays in treatment and lack of access to services in a number of communities in the Interlake.
The Arborg hospital’s ER had been out of service for months on end because of staffing shortages, and the Eriksdale hospital’s ER continues to limp along with availability reduced to a handful of days each month.
The NDP says Budget 2024 will “start to fix the staffing crisis in health care” and include investments in infrastructure. The NDP is allocating $310-million to retention, recruitment and training to address staffing shortages and plans to hire – this year – 100 doctors, 210 nurses, 90 paramedics and 600 health care aides. The party also plans to open a dedicated recruitment and retention office and expand education programs for health care workers, including medical laboratory technologists.
“Rebuilding health care starts with staffing. For seven years, health care staff were disrespected and ignored, but our government is committed to taking better care of the health care workers that care for us,” states the government in the budget.
Interlake-Gimli MLA (Progressive Conservative) Derek Johnson said rural areas of Manitoba, including in the Interlake, saw 16 emergency rooms close under the NDP when the party was in power prior to 2016. While he welcomes a new ER in Eriksdale, he’s concerned there won’t be enough staff to operate it.
“You can have all the fancy stuff you want, but staffing has always been a concern. It’s not only about having enough doctors, but you also need a lab tech and an X-ray tech or a cross-trained tech (X-ray and lab) on call to keep an ER open,” said Johnson. “It’s often overlooked but support staff are important to ensure emergency rooms stay open.”
He added that the Conservative government had being working with Shared Health on a cross-training technologist program so that in a staffing crisis “you can keep an ER open through cross-trained staff.”
Johnson said the NDP government is riding on the Conservatives’ coattails as far as retention and recruitment of staff go in areas such as pay incentives.
“We had implemented premium shifts where if you’re working evening and weekends, you’re getting a larger paycheque. A larger paycheque doesn’t necessarily stop you from getting burnt out, but it provides more of an incentive for someone to pick up a shift and offer help on evenings and weekends,” he said.
More concerning in the overall scheme of recruitment and retention is the failure to increase residency seats for graduates completing their first four years of medical training, he said. That will only drive doctors out of Manitoba rather than keep them here.
“The Conservative government doubled the doctors’ training seats and we’re starting to see those students graduating. But the NDP has not followed up on increasing the residency seats where doctors start getting clinical practice. That was part of our plan. All these students are graduating and there are only a few residency spots that are accommodating them,” he said. “These doctors are looking to leave the province. These are our home-grown doctors from Manitoba who’ll have to seek residency in another province. Often what happens is they’ll meet Mrs. or Mr. Right and decide to lay down roots elsewhere.”
The NDP’s budget promises capital investments in hospital emergency rooms and personal care homes. For the Eriksdale hospital in particular, the government has so far committed funding to only the design phase rather than to the cost to build it.
“So far there’s zero dollars budgeted towards the work on the new ER for Eriksdale,” said Johnson. “The budget for that would come next year. They’re only moving forward with a design phase.”
The NDP has also promised a one-time investment of $110-million for health system capacity expansion that will focus on clinics and hospitals. It includes “four personal care homes, starting with one in Lac du Bonnet in 2024/25, followed by two in Winnipeg and one in Arborg.”
Last summer, the Conservative government had announced $15 million in funding for the pre-construction phase (planning and design) of six new PCHs, including in Arborg and in Stonewall. The Town of Arborg and the Municipality of Bifrost-Riverton have been working towards and advocating for a new PCH since at least 2015.
Johnson said the Conservatives had also approved $50.3 million in funding to build the new Arborg PCH. That could not be formally announced as the government was in a blackout period prior to the election.
“We approved that $50.3 million funding. It was put through the treasury board and ratified by cabinet,” said Johnson. “We fully funded three of the six PCHs – Arborg, Bridgewater [in Winnipeg] and Lac du Bonnet, but the NDP government put a pause on most PCHs.
He added that the NDP has only approved funding for one of four PCHs it announced – Lac du Bonnet.
Johnson said he’s also worried about driving doctors out of Manitoba because of the NDP’s increasing the tax on the Top 1 per cent of income earners, a category into which doctors fall.
“If you’re driving up the income tax on doctors, how are you supposed to attract them?” he said.
On the infrastructure front, which is vital to people living in the Interlake and other rural areas, Johnson said the NDP’s budget has reduced funding – $163 million less – for roads and water infrastructure such as drains.
“The maintenance of drains is not sexy, but drains need maintenance. You can’t just build them and leave them,” he said. “There have been multiple issues with flooding in the past including around Arborg and along Lake Manitoba. Funding has been cut for drains such as the Lake Manitoba Outlet Channel.”
It’s also important to maintain drains to prevent crop damages and nutrient loading, he added. When water pools on a field, it soaks up fertilizer (nutrients) which eventually finds its way into Lake Winnipeg. Different areas of the province are currently experiencing varying levels of drought, and the ideal time to work on repairing drains is now.
“In dry years you can get a lot more bang for your buck,” he said. “You can get a lot more miles of drains done per dollar in a dry year than in a wet year.”
He surmises that the cuts to infrastructure were done in order to fulfil the NDP’s multi-billion campaign promise. But the cuts will come at the expense of rural areas.
Another concern in the Interlake for school divisions, such as the Evergreen School Division, are the NDP’s cuts to education, said Johnson.
“The Evergreen School Division was earmarked to get 74 new daycare spaces. There’s been a $100-million-dollar cut from new schools and daycares at the same time we’re seeing a surge in students,” he said. “Almost every new school [the Conservatives promised] had daycare spaces included in it. When you cut those new schools, you’re also cutting daycare spaces.”
Johnson served as agriculture minister under the previous Conservative government and said he sees nothing new in the NDP’s budget for agriculture; the government is maintaining Conservative programs which had included budgeting to re-open Manitoba Agricultural Services Corporation centres.
“All the announcements I’ve seen are the announcements I had worked on while I was [agriculture minister],” he said, “whether that’s increase to ag in the classroom, or an increase to 4-H or any of our projects with our watershed districts – all that programming was done under the previous government. I had announced in Lundar that we were going to ensure the rents for Crown lands remain at 50 per cent. And the NDP has kept the Conservatives’ campaign promise of doing that.”
A major concern facing the agricultural sector is a labour shortage. Workers are processed through the provincial nominee program (PNP), he said. Because of red tape, workers are facing long processing times.
“The PNP waiting list, in these short six months [since the new government took power], has been increasing substantially. When we took over government, we saw five-year waiting lists on PNP and we got it down to a matter of months,” said Johnson. “They haven’t been processing the applications. I’ve had people living in the Interlake reach out saying they’re a matter of a week or two of being deported because their paperwork hasn’t been processed. That almost never happened under our government after we got caught up from the NDP backlog.”
Although the gas tax cut (14 cents a litre) is appreciated in rural Manitoba, Johnson said it’s only temporary and the NDP will have to come up with another revenue source to fund infrastructure.
The province earns about $342 million a year from the 14-cent fuel tax, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
“Historically in Manitoba that 14 cents a litre goes straight towards infrastructure and improving roads. From where is the government going to make up that money? It has to come from somewhere else or they’re going to stop repairing roads,” Johnson said. “That said, I’m fine if they remove the gas tax permanently to make life more affordable because that helps rural Manitobans.”
In other areas of the budget, Johnson said the NDP made a 50 per cent reduction to the provincial parks budget which covers things like good toilets, trails and repairs to the Hecla Village Road – all of which could negatively affect tourism.
“That cut trickles down to tourism. If you have great experience in a park, you’re likely to return. But if the toilets are falling apart, you twist an ankle on a walking path or pop a tire on one of the roads, you’re less likely to return to Manitoba,” he said.
The budget also cut the Arts Culture and Sports Grant that had previously provided funding to places like Gimli to enable the town to install a new roof on its recreation centre and repair change rooms.
Johnson said although he has many concerns with the budget, he also has to “commend” the NDP for keeping all the personal income tax cuts the Conservatives made.
“People end up with a lot more money in their pocket every single year, predominantly lower income people, because we indexed the tax,” he said. “You only start paying tax in Manitoba now at $15,000. It had been [very low] before that. People keep every penny of that tax dollar. And they’ve kept the rest of our tax cuts so far.”
