Premier Wab Kinew delivered his second throne speech last week, outlining his government’s priorities to take Manitoba forward after over a year of the NDP forming a majority government.
The theme is hope for the future, with Manitobans working together and a government improving their lives.
“The challenges we face today in our province are not unique: a health-care system in need of repair, family budgets under stress, the humanitarian crisis of addiction and homelessness that weighs on all our hearts,” states the Nov. 19 throne speech. “Yet how we respond to these challenges is what sets us apart. Our great nation has never been perfect. But here in Manitoba, we are giving people reasons to hope with a plan that makes your life better.”
The throne speech outlines steps the government has already taken and what it promises to do in a number of areas including healthcare, with the hiring and retention of more doctors, the environment, with a promise to make big polluters pay, the economy, with a promise to get Manitobans into the workforce, and immigration, with a plan to bring in a “record-number” of new immigrants to Manitoba through the provincial nominee program and extend work permits. Other priorities include housing, education, agriculture, freedom of the press and the protection of democracy.
In a news release, premier Wab Kinew said the government is “making progress” in a number of areas and “won’t stop working to make life better for all Manitobans.”
The government is hiring a “record number” of doctor and retaining them at a “higher rate” than in years past, listening to nurses and implementing solutions to provide them with work-life balance, increasing wages for health-care support workers and bringing in foreign-trained medical graduates.
“To the young people thinking about a career in health care: come and be a part of this positive change. Here in Manitoba, you will find a government that listens to you and a job offer the day you graduate. We will continue to staff up our health-care system after years of cuts,” states the throne speech.
Interlake-Gimli MLA Derek Johnson said he doesn’t see a lot of evidence of the NDP having made progress in health care.
“If progress is having our ERs in rural Manitoba closed, they’ve made progress. They haven’t made any improvements so I don’t know what their definition of progress is,” said Johnson. “We’ve [former Conservative government] put more doctors in school and it takes a long time for them to graduate. As well, we doubled nursing seats and we’re having more graduates. That’s coming to fruition now, but rural Manitoba is still struggling to keep its ERs open, and open ERs is something [Interlakers] want and deserve.”
In the western half of the Interlake-Eastern Regional Health Authority, Teulon and Arborg have had their ERs permanently closed. Eriksdale’s ER is open only six days a month, and other hospital ERs in communities such as Ashern, Gimli, Stonewall experience regular disruptions to service because of inadequate staffing levels. The three hospital ERs in the eastern half of the health region are also struggling to provide service.
The NDP promised to build a new ER in Eriksdale, but Johnson said a new building won’t solve a staffing deficit.
“The reason why Eriksdale is not open [most of the time] is because of staffing issues. But during the election, people believed they would get a new ER,” he said. “If you don’t solve the problem of not having staff there, it will be a new ER that will be closed. This is a human resource issues that needs addressing.”
The government says it’s retaining doctors at a higher rate, but Johnson said he’s not sure of that as Manitoba is not a welcoming place for new graduates. Doctors will determine what province is most advantageous to their bottom line. With the NDP having made income tax changes, doctors in the $200,000 income bracket and above may think twice about working in the province.
“The NDP are making it easier for doctors to decide not to come to Manitoba because they’ll pay more taxes,” said Johnson.
The NDP says in the throne speech that there’s reason to hope regarding the economy as families are “starting to feel relief because of the action we’ve taken to lower costs and create more good jobs.”
Some of those relief measures included a temporary 14-cents-a-litre reduction on gasoline. And the government promises to introduce a one-year freeze on Hydro rates starting in 2025, as well as a plan to “stop anti-competitive contracts that make groceries more expensive.”
The government says it’s growing the economy through areas such as job creation, mineral exports and new infrastructure projects, and plans to expand the forestry sector. It wants Manitobans who aren’t working to “join the workforce.” The premier’s Business and Jobs Council will release a “new economic development strategy outlining the next phase of economic growth in Manitoba with a new focus on productivity.”
Johnson said he’s all for the NDP’s gas-tax reduction and would even like to see it become permanent, but that has to be conjunction with a balanced budget.
“The PC party is the party of less tax and more bang for the buck, so I would say that if you can balance the budget and make this tax reduction permanent, that would be ideal,” he said. “But it has to be in conjunction with balancing the budget.”
Currently, the province is running deficit, he said. And Manitobans will be in for sticker shock when the temporary gas-tax holiday ends and the province’s low inflation rate will “shoot up substantially” in January.
“I believe that reducing income tax to put money in people’s pockets and letting them decide how they want to spend it is a better way to make life better for Manitobans. It’s far more important to increase the basic personal exemption for people who are struggling; that’s what we did when we were in government,” said Johnson. “Someone who’s struggling to pay their bills and put food on the table probably won’t go driving around every day so they’re not really benefiting from the gas tax holiday.”
The dream of buying a home in Manitoba is out of reach for many workers. Renters, too, have not escaped housing profiteers as they’re seeing yearly rent increases, some so excessive that they’ve been driven out of their units. Making housing unaffordable has also exacerbated homelessness.
But the NDP says home ownership in Manitoba is within reach, and that they’ll make “life more affordable for renters by strengthening protections with new laws.” The throne speech has no details of how that will happen. They’ll also tackle homelessness.
“There should be no chronic homelessness in a rich country like Canada. We’re moving forward quickly by bringing organizations, governments and Indigenous nations together to move people from tents to housing with our new plan to end chronic homelessness over the next seven years,” states the throne speech.
The NDP also promises to introduce a tax credit for rental housing builders.
Johnson said it remains to be seen whether a tax credit will spur on construction, and the NDP could reduce red tape that hinders construction from moving forward.
In October the NDP announced they were putting a “pause” on moving forward with the proposed Lake Manitoba and Lake St. Martin outlet channels that will help mitigate catastrophic flooding from water the government sends through the Portage Diversion into Lake Manitoba. In the throne speech, the government said it’s “moving forward with the channels project in the Interlake.”
“I think the NDP heard loud and clear from people around Lake Manitoba. There were so many people who were beyond angry when the NDP said they wanted to pause it. My phone was ringing off the hook from people who were upset with the government,” said Johnson. “I’m not surprised at all they’ve decided to move forward with it because it’s too important for Manitoba. And our party carried out robust consultations on the channels with First Nations. Kinew’s government said there were no consultations because I think they wanted to put a pause on it then come back as the heroes of the project.”
The NDP promises to protect the environment through a number of initiatives, including making polluters pay and establishing a new stakeholder group to address pollution in Lake Winnipeg.
“The health of Lake Winnipeg matters to all of us. In the spirit of One Manitoba, we will establish a Lake Winnipeg stakeholder working group with producers, environmental experts, Indigenous nations and industry representatives to ensure the sustainability of our lake,” states the throne speech.
There have been numerous stakeholder groups over the past decades addressing pollution in Lake Winnipeg from sources such as wastewater, raw sewage and agricultural nutrients. Johnson questions why there’s a need for a new group.
“Will they now disregard all the hard work that previous stakeholder groups and people like Robert T. [Kristjanson, a commercial fisher] have done and start from scratch again?” said Johnson. “Maybe this is a delay tactic where they’re distracting and redirecting attention.”
In terms of making polluters pay, Johnson said “we’ve heard this before from the NDP” and they did nothing. The Conservatives, on the other hand, worked hard to get the federal government to share the cost of upgrading the city’s North End Water Pollution Control Centre – which is a point source for phosphorus – and provided funding to the city, which was reluctant at the time to raise taxes.
“I also don’t know what [make polluters pay] is directed towards, whether it’s the City of Winnipeg and its combined sewers or carbon release,” he said. “They’re so evasive in their throne speech that you can’t really pin them down on anything.”
As far as the NDP’s agricultural initiatives, Johnson said there’s really nothing new. The Crown land rent freeze was his own initiative when he served as Manitoba’s agriculture minister, and the NDP are simply “continuing on” with it.
What the NDP could be doing is fulfilling a promise to provide life leases on Crown land and look at ways to compensate livestock farmers who lose animals to predator kills, he said. The provincial-federal compensation program requires a carcass before farmers can claim a loss, but wolves will often eat the entire carcass or cart it off somewhere else.
“We need to make it easier but not make it easy to be fraudulent,” said Johnson. “If I ever served as ag minister again, I would rally other ministers across the country to pressure the federal minister to expand agriculture insurance.”
Manitoba already faces challenges on the economic, health care and housing front, and a new set of challenges could arise when president-elect Donald Trump takes office in January and institutes a new set of policies to protect the American economy.
Johnson said Trump’s made-in-America agenda could affect Manitoba in areas such as agriculture and trade.
“One of the things we’ll have to watch for is country-of-origin labelling,” he said. “The meat products on the shelf in the USA have to be 100 per cent born, raised, harvested and packaged in the USA in order to have a USA label. Manitoba beef and pork is born, partially raised here then shipped down to the USA for finishing and processing. Those products will not be eligible for a USA label on it in the stores there. So, if you have identically priced meat products from comparable countries of origin, consumers will likely pick a USA product over Canada, the same way Canadian shoppers would likely choose a meat product with a Canadian label. Country-of-origin of labeling could be a problem for our agricultural producers.”
About eight per cent of Manitoba’s GDP is agriculture, he added. Pork accounts for about two per cent of the provincial GDP, and 85 per cent of pork is exported outside the province. A “huge” proportion of Manitoba piglets are sent to the U.S.
If Trump also puts a tariff on all goods coming into America, Johnson said consumers on both sides of the border could suffer from inflation.
Some Manitoba companies that build products and have markets in the USA have to ship pieces of their product down to the US where they’re assembled by American workers. That’s a requirement under America’s 50 per cent built-in-the-USA rule, said Johnson.
“If that requirement gets changed [under Trump] to say maybe 70 per cent built in the USA, a company here would probably have to consider moving down to the States,” he said. “That’s the biggest fear with the buy American campaign.”
The throne speech is available online at www.gov.mb.ca/thronespeech
