Not much standing in Pallister’s way

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/05/2019 (2012 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was New Democratic Party Leader Wab Kinew’s big moment in the Manitoba legislature on Monday. Finally, he had some polling numbers to prove all along what many have suspected: Winnipeggers are unhappy with the restructuring of hospitals, the closures of emergency rooms and layoffs of nurses.

In a bombastic condemnation, he used those numbers to accuse Premier Brian Pallister of not listening to Manitobans, while at the same time, lambasting the Tory leader for his management style. The poll, conducted by Probe Research in a series of quarterly surveys between 2017 and 2018, indicates 39 per cent of Winnipeggers feel the health-care system within the city is getting worse. That number of dissatisfied respondents doubled from 2017 to 2018.

Of course, 48 per cent of those surveyed felt the service was the same, something Kinew failed to mention. He also failed to mention this survey was of Winnipeggers in general, and not of people who actually used the health-care system. According to the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, the majority of people who accessed the system were satisfied with the service they received.

But there is no doubt the changes have caused anxiety, and there is evidence wait times in emergency rooms have increased since the Pallister government made the decision to reduce the number of emergency rooms and urgent-care facilities in the city. Under the plans announced so far by the government and the WRHA, there will be three ERs and only two urgent-care centres once the restructuring is completed later this year. Concordia Hospital’s ER is slated to become a walk-in clinic, though the timing of closure plans could be affected if Pallister’s often-hinted-at early provincial election becomes a reality.

And yet, if you witness what’s happening in the province to the east of us, Manitobans have been relatively quiet in terms of protest, and that raises a lot of questions.

Last week, more than 1,000 people from all over Ontario rallied in Toronto to protest Premier Doug Ford’s changes to health care, including changes to paramedic services, public health funding and the creation of a super-agency called Ontario Health intended to cut back on the duplication of services.

The protesters represented numerous unions, patients and health-care providers and voiced concerns about privatization of services and a decline in the quality of health care.

These concerns are similar to those felt in Manitoba, although the cuts here might not be nearly as drastic. But what has been our public response so far? We’ve seen some small protests at the legislature, including a gathering Tuesday of about 100 people in support of midwives. A few hundred showed up Wednesday outside Concordia Hospital to oppose to the ER closure there. Protests by the Manitoba Nurses Union might get 400 people out. Lawn signs let politicians know during the last civic election that homeowners value their ERs.

We’ve seen no provincial day of protest. No marches to shut down Portage and Main. No return to our roots of a general strike. No polling that suggests the Tories are going to pay for this at the ballot box if they were to call an election anytime soon. And let’s face it, that’s what really matters.

In the long run, Kinew can talk all he wants about how Manitobans don’t like Pallister’s management style, but frankly, no one seems to be standing in the Tories’ way.

First, the changes being suggested come from a report commissioned by the NDP when they were in power, suggesting when they were in government, they knew there was a problem with the way health care was being delivered in the city. The report, “Clinical and Preventive Services Planning for Manitoba” — or the Peachey report, named after the Nova Scotia physician who is the consultant behind it — recommended closing three Winnipeg ERs and replacing two of them with urgent-care centres as part of an overall consolidation effort to concentrate resources and improve the quality of health care in the province.

Second, the NDP is struggling to organize itself, let alone organize protests against health-care cuts. Their polling numbers within Winnipeg have not changed in any substantive way, when considering the margin of error, since March 2017, and the Pallister Tories are still holding strong both in and outside the city. More importantly, in 2018, the Manitoba Tories raised more than $2 million in donations, triple the amount the NDP accumulated. Pallister could easily run an election campaign and win right now.

That reveals a rather nasty reality. If Kinew can’t gain momentum now, in the midst of health-care cuts, nursing layoffs and talk of privatization, it’s likely he never will. Maybe it’s time for the NDP to cut its losses.

Third, there’s been no outrage at the civic level, either, which is fascinating. On Monday, Toronto Mayor John Tory declared war on Ford, hoping to pressure the Ontario premier into reconsidering budget cuts not only to health care, but also to education, transit and child care.

In comparison. Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman has shown his frustration with Pallister, trying to hold him accountable for promised provincial funding on various projects, but when it comes to speaking up for health care, he has remained largely silent. Yes, he’s made it clear he wants more to be done to fight the meth crisis and he supports moving ahead with supervised injection sites in Winnipeg. But with this mayor, one wonders if he’s trying to keep his future political career options open by not speaking out too loudly against the ER closures and the restructuring.

It is a provincial responsibility, of course, but city residents are affected by these decisions. Why hasn’t Bowman, like Tory, been more vocal about health care for the people of Winnipeg?

Finally, the union environment within the health-care system is in a state of flux. Manitoba’s 180 health-sector bargaining units have been amalgamated into approximately 40, based on the type of work employees do, not where they work. This caused some infighting between two significant union groups, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, with CUPE suggesting the MGEU was deliberately hiding information from its membership and creating fear.

It’s hard to organize health-care workers when the unions who represent them aren’t getting along.

All this is to say Pallister may not have a management style that everyone loves, but you don’t go into management to be liked — you go into management to get the job done. And it looks like no one is going to stand in his way when it comes to restructuring health care in Winnipeg.

Shannon Sampert is a political scientist at the University of Winnipeg.

s.sampert@uwinnipeg.ca Twitter: @paulysigh