Desperate Tories’ health-care defence long past best-before date Klein gets eight-year-old water pistol to extinguish ER-chaos firestorm in Kirkfield Park byelection By: Dan Lett Posted: 7:00 PM CST Monday, Dec. 5, 2022

Opinion

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This article was published 04/12/2022 (654 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If the last week of campaigning in the upcoming Kirkfield Park byelection is any indication, the Tories have no antidote to what ails them most.

The working theory being employed by opposition parties looking to steal Kirkfield Park from the Progressive Conservatives has been to hammer away at the government’s record on health care. The riding is home to Grace Hospital, one of the three remaining hospital emergency rooms, all of which have been crippled by nursing shortages.

NDP Leader Wab Kinew and candidate Logan Oxenham have already held a rally outside the Grace to ensure Kirkfield Park voters know just how strained the hospital network has been under PC management. The Liberals, meanwhile, are represented by Rhonda Nichol, a nurse who put in nearly 30 years working at Grace. The Liberals have already released a five-point health-care strategy to highlight the need for a new hand on the helm of the hospital system.

Both parties are doing the right thing. The Tories are shaky on health care and have provided their opponents with a treasure trove of raw material to work with: chronic staffing shortages, skyrocketing wait times, ineffective action plans and woeful outcomes.

And the comeback from the Tories?

Candidate Kevin Klein, the former city councillor who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in October, was paraded in front of journalists last week to discuss the woeful record managing ERs the former NDP government had. In 2014.

Faced with a constant barrage of complaints and criticism about how it has mismanaged the controversial hospital reorganization that closed all but three now-overwhelmed and dysfunctional emergency rooms, the best the Tories could do was arm Klein with eight-year-old data that doesn’t really explain or justify the mess we are experiencing right now.

It didn’t make things any better when Klein asserted, mistakenly, that the cataract surgery wait list has been eliminated. After reporters convinced him that was not the case, he apologized.

It didn’t make things any better when Klein asserted, mistakenly, that the cataract surgery wait list has been eliminated. After reporters convinced him that was not the case, he apologized.

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the Tories face in Kirkfield Park.

Although it should be a safe Tory riding — held most recently by former cabinet minister Scott Fielding — health care could very well be the government’s kryptonite.

All of Premier Heather Stefanson’s strategies to address backlogs in surgical and diagnostic procedures and alleviate chronic understaffing, have failed to produce meaningful results. That leaves the government and its candidates trying to defend news releases and unfulfilled pledges while opposition parties point to real-time experiences of Manitobans trying to access health services.

Most surprising is that given the importance of retaining Kirkfield Park, the government could not compose a more compelling campaign narrative.

The Tories are somewhat limited in what they can introduce during the byelection campaign because of a blackout on government announcements. Still, Stefanson controlled the timing of the campaign, and Klein is being asked to repeat the claims and pledges that, to date, have failed to restore support in the PC government.

When Klein claimed the cataract surgery wait list had been eliminated, he was simply parroting the erroneous pronouncement made last month by Health Minister Audrey Gordon. Provincial data and news reports very quickly established there were nearly 6,000 people still on the wait list and the delay to get a consult and date for surgery was still as long as two years.

When she took over leadership of the party last November, the strategy for reducing the government’s vulnerability on health care was pretty straightforward: fix as many of the things you broke in your first six years in office, and hope that voters appreciate the effort.

Instead, Stefanson appears to be stuck in the muddy ruts her predecessor, former premier Brian Pallister, left as his legacy to the party and the province.

When faced with incontrovertible evidence that his much-touted hospital reorganization plan had backfired in spectacular fashion, Pallister would spew all sorts of wild claims about how things were actually better than they looked. When news media and opposition critics looked deeper into Pallister’s assertions, they found the premier had been making what appeared to be deliberately false claims.

At the same time, it seemed that just about every suggestion for improving the performance of the system that came from outside government — organizations representing doctors and nurses, labour unions and individual practitioners — was greeted with disdain.

It should be noted the Tories are still very much in the race for Kirkfield Park. They’ve held the riding for a long time and even though the government is decidedly unpopular in most areas of Winnipeg, nothing galvanizes core support like desperation. And the Tories are desperate to keep the riding.

The opposition parties, as well, face a mathematical dilemma that could aid Klein. In this riding, anti-Tory support could be split among the Liberals and NDP. The Green Party is also running in this campaign and every vote that candidate Dennis Bayomi gets will likely be one that would otherwise go to the NDP or Liberals.

The Tories still have more than a puncher’s chance of retaining Kirkfield Park. But Klein’s party is going to have to give him more to work with if it expects to survive.

dan.lett@winnipegfreepress.com

Dan Lett
Columnist

Born and raised in and around Toronto, Dan Lett came to Winnipeg in 1986, less than a year out of journalism school with a lifelong dream to be a newspaper reporter.

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