Manitoba health minister signed health accord three days before claiming otherwise By: Dylan Robertson Posted: 5:11 PM CDT Monday, Apr. 1, 2019 Last Modified: 11:30 PM CDT Monday, Apr. 1, 2019 Updates

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This article was published 31/03/2019 (2000 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Manitoba Health Minister Cameron Friesen signed Ottawa’s health accord three days before claiming he hadn’t, according to a document obtained by the Free Press.

The spat is the latest in a series of funding agreements Ottawa says Manitoba has been stalling to finalize.

A portion of the federal health accord shows Friesen signed the agreement March 26.

Federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor confirmed Ottawa signed the agreement March 28, after “a lot of delays.”

The next day, Friesen wrote to the Free Press the talks hadn’t finished — which Premier Brian Pallister said Monday was wrong.

Friesen had declined an interview March 29, instead writing that day “dialogue with federal officials on the bilateral agreement has been productive. We look forward to updating Manitobans when these negotiations conclude.”

The Free Press featured those comments in an article Monday, which Pallister said was incorrect, blaming Ottawa for asking to keep the agreement under wraps to not distract from its blitz about the federal budget.

“Because of the rules they have around their announcements around budget time, they didn’t want us to announce” the agreement, the premier said.

‘Because of the rules they have around their announcements around budget time, they didn’t want us to announce’
– Premier Brian Pallister

Petitpas Taylor slammed the Pallister government for taking more than seven months to sign the agreement, which unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

“We’ve been under negotiations for the past several months now, and I have to say I’m extremely disappointed it has taken this period of time to come to a negotiated settlement,” Petitpas Taylor told the Free Press.

“I have to say that we were close to an agreement back in the summer of 2018. But then from there, there were a lot of delays.”

She noted the agreement is required to uncork Manitoba’s share of mental-health and home-care funding, amounting to $399.6 million over a decade.

‘Not aware of any blackout’

Petitpas Taylor also said Monday she was unaware of a federal policy against making bilateral announcements shortly after the federal budget. “I’m not aware of any blackout,” she said.

On Monday, when shown a copy of the letter he signed, Friesen’s office issued a statement challenging that timeline.

“Last week, we were very clear when we said Manitobans would be updated shortly on negotiations with the federal government on the health bilateral agreement. As with any bilat between the two levels of government, substantive agreement between senior provincial and federal officials occurs before being formally presented to both ministers. Negotiations are only considered complete when both ministers have signed,” Friesen said in the statement. 

‘We’ve been under negotiations for the past several months now and I have to say I’m extremely disappointed it has taken this period of time to come to a negotiated settlement’
– Federal Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor

“I signed the agreement last Tuesday, and it was promptly sent to the federal minister’s office the following morning. We received notification from the federal government late this afternoon that Minister Petipas Taylor had signed.

“It’s regrettable that the Free Press is choosing to mischaracterize how this situation unfolded.”

Sources at both levels of government said Ottawa had requested a period of time to only announce items related to the March 19 federal budget, with the exception of canola-related issues. As Pallister indicated, Ottawa had asked to not announce the agreement until a later date.

Last Friday, Health Canada wrote it had no “new announcement” and “no changes to the list” of who had signed, despite Manitoba having inked its agreement.

The Pallister government reluctantly accepted Ottawa’s health accord in August 2017, after a months-long battle with the federal government that saw Manitoba as the last jurisdiction to accept Ottawa’s terms.

The Liberals put up cash for mental-health and home-care programs in late 2016 to sweeten its deal to cut transfer payments to the provinces, in an attempt to control expenditures.

The Trudeau government has curtailed the rise of the health-care transfers to provinces to three per cent, representing a $2.25-billion drop in what Manitoba would have otherwise received over the coming decade, which Pallister has called “dangerous.”

Manitoba’s mental-health cash was part of a total of $1.9 billion in federal cash Ottawa said last month the Pallister government had yet to sign off on or submit claims for. Roughly $1.5 billion remains in limbo for everything from infrastructure to housing.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca