Opposition leaders attack premier on second wave spending By: Carol Sanders Posted: 7:23 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020 Last Modified: 8:17 PM CST Tuesday, Nov. 3, 2020 Updates

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Premier Brian Pallister’s stinginess is on full display in his reaction to Manitoba’s COVID-19 crisis, critics say.

Not preparing nursing homes and hospital ICUs for the pandemic’s second wave, not providing enough relief to businesses on the brink, and calling on volunteers to help out at COVID-19 testing rather than paying people to work are just glaring examples, opposition leaders said Tuesday, in and outside the house.

At a news conference Tuesday calling for volunteers to help at COVID-19 testing sites and tasks such as shovelling snow for the elderly, Pallister was asked why the province wasn’t prepared to stop the virus from running wild in care homes and hospitals, after it was warned a likely worse wave was coming and it had months to prepare.

“The government didn’t invent COVID, didn’t bring it here and didn’t spread it,” he told reporters. “All we can do is react and prepare to react, and remind people of their role in this.”

Saying that’s all that can be done shows an absence of proper leadership, Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont countered.

“That government can’t do anything but react — that’s the opposite of what emergency preparations are supposed to be for,” Lamont said outside the chamber.

“They said: ‘We’ll wait and see. We don’t want to spend a bunch of money on prevention if it’s not going to happen.’ Well, that guarantees it’s going to happen. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

During question period Tuesday, Pallister was asked about a COVID-19 funding letter the government sent in late August to the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority to provide some assurance facilities would be reimbursed in the months to come.

It didn’t promise any up-front funds to prepare for a second wave, and warned that any such spending would be scrutinized.

The letter obtained by the NDP told department officials some care homes would be subject to audits, in order to assure accuracy and validity and noted any facilities experiencing cash or liquidity challenges should report it immediately to ensure ongoing business continuity.

“The funding letter didn’t have any new money,” NDP Opposition Leader Wab Kinew told the house.

“All it said is: keep your receipts,” he said, accusing the government of tight-fistedness when it should’ve been urging facilities to spend as needed to prepare.

The government invested an additional $640 million in health care before the pandemic, and its coronavirus funding goes where it’s needed, Pallister said.

“We listen to the experts to target the money to achieve better outcomes,” the premier said.

Testing capacity has quadrupled, and hospital ICU bed planning (although under strain now) proceeded through the summer, he noted.

It was an answer Lamont took issue with.

Rather than readying for the second wave during the summer slowdown of COVID-19, the province launched it’s Ready, Safe, Grow economic reopening campaign and was entertaining the possibility of becoming a hub city for the CFL, the Winnipeg MLA told reporters.

“We’d be a CFL hub city in the middle of a code red right now, if they got their plan signed off on,” Lamont said. “That’s how much they didn’t believe there would be a second wave.”

With his premier on defence in the house and the media, Finance Minister Scott Fielding joined the scrum to tell reporters how much the government is doing to support Manitobans and how hard Pallister is working on their behalf.

“The premier is working night and day for the citizens of Manitoba. He’s in all weekend, working on a lot of these projects,” Fielding said of his boss.

The GAP protection program that covers businesses ineligible for federal programs has spent $642,000 in the last week and helped 10,000 applicants so far, said Fielding. Wage subsidy programs have supported thousands of businesses, he said.

It’s not enough, critics argued.

“A wage subsidy doesn’t help me if my employees are not working and the costs of business keep piling up,” said Kinew, calling for a grant of up to $30,000 to help businesses survive the second wave of the pandemic.

“The first wave was hugely damaging to business, but many of them were able to lean on lines of credit,” Kinew said. That’s been tapped out, he said. “It’s incumbent on government to help those job creators survive.”

“This is not a regular recession, this is a natural disaster,” Lamont added.

“If the premier and province want to talk about this as the biggest deal in a 100 years, then make it the biggest response in 100 years,” the Liberal leader said. “That’s what we need. Instead, he’s nickel-and-diming, asking people to work for free and expecting people to go broke.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

After 20 years of reporting on the growing diversity of people calling Manitoba home, Carol moved to the legislature bureau in early 2020.

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