Crucial budget for Tories: experts

Health care top priority for Manitobans, polls say

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Coming out of the worst health and economic crisis in Manitoba history, all eyes will be on the Progressive Conservative government’s first budget without deficit-slaying premier Brian Pallister at the helm — and whether the Tories do something “dramatic” to stay in power.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2022 (1026 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Coming out of the worst health and economic crisis in Manitoba history, all eyes will be on the Progressive Conservative government’s first budget without deficit-slaying premier Brian Pallister at the helm — and whether the Tories do something “dramatic” to stay in power.

Premier Heather Stefanson — whose party has lagged behind the NDP in polls — must find a balance between satisfying her fiscally conservative base, healing a health-care system in crisis and meeting the needs of Manitobans slammed with a rising cost of living.

Traditionally, Tory budgets have been big on cutting taxes and reducing deficits.

MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES
Premier Heather Stefanson’s Conservative party has lagged behind the NDP in polls.
MIKE DEAL / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS FILES Premier Heather Stefanson’s Conservative party has lagged behind the NDP in polls.

Last year, the Pallister budget announced a $190-million, 25 per cent education property tax rebate for homeowners and farmers, pledging a further 25 per cent cut this year. The Stefanson government hasn’t indicated if it will make good on that promise but said Manitobans can expect some tax relief this year to offset inflationary pressures.

“Our government understands how important it is to help households struggling with cost increases and investing in health care,” Finance Minister Cameron Friesen said in a prepared statement. Friesen, the former health minister, was not available for an interview Friday to discuss Tuesday’s budget.

In 2022, Manitobans appear to be united around a single budget item: health care.

Health was the main concern of 98 per cent of respondents in the government’s pre-budget survey, while 49 per cent said it was lowering taxes. Forty-eight per cent said reducing the deficit was most important.

The province will have to do something bold to address the health-care crisis and the backlog of surgeries, University of Manitoba associate professor of economics Gregory Mason said.

“If I were them, I would make a choice — I would make this budget all about health care and restructuring the health-care system,” Mason said.

“Right now, the government solution to solving the backlog is… whipping the horses — just beating the horses harder and getting everyone to work harder, and do more and expand surgical slots and all that kind of stuff,” he said.

“But it doesn’t fundamentally rethink our health-care system. It’s really just applying the same old remedies,” Mason said. “I think there needs to be some kind of deep structural rethink to how we deliver health care.”

Mason said there are successful European health-care models that cost less and have better outcomes and that, within Canada, fees are being introduced in provinces within the Canada Health Act.

“All these actions are taking place around our feet, and we’re just looking at the horizon pretending that we are OK,” he said.

Win or lose in the next election, slated for 2023, the PCs have an opportunity to start a real overhaul of health care, Mason said.

“If I were in their shoes, I would say, ‘If we don’t do something fairly dramatic, we’re going down,’” he said.

If the party is headed for defeat, it’s better to stay true to its principles of prudence and start the restructuring, Mason said.

That kind of scenario is worrisome to Jesse Hajer, a fellow University of Manitoba professor.

“If this government doesn’t think it has a chance at getting re-elected, it could do some things that are really unpopular to satisfy its constituency that it feels accountable to,” Hajer, an economics and labour studies professor, said.

“What we saw at the end of the Filmon era was the privatization of MTS despite promises not to do so,” said Hajer, a research associate at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Manitoba.

“I’m concerned that something like that will happen now that would be bad public policy but good for the conservative base,” he said. Having this government “on the ropes,” Hajer said, “is a very dangerous situation.”

He challenged Mason’s assertion about the best way to fund health care.

“When you end up with these public-private splits, you end up with resources being misallocated. You have doctors that go to work in the private sector who have the more well-off clients or the less ill. They get all the attention, and the people who are ill and (require more resources) are left to the under-resourced public system,” Hajer said. “They’re really non-solutions.”

Voters got what they were promised — tax cuts and fiscal restraint — when they first elected the PCs in 2016, Hajer said.

“But people are starting to realize that that actually isn’t such a good thing after all, because those tax cuts are coming at the expense of our health and education systems.”

carol sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders

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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