Manitoba NDP says it will reopen 3 Winnipeg ERs shuttered under current government
CBC
The Manitoba NDP is promising to reopen emergency rooms that were shuttered at three Winnipeg hospitals if they form government in the upcoming election.
That plan will start with building a new ER at the Victoria Hospital to meet the needs of south Winnipeg's growing population, NDP Leader Wab Kinew said at a news conference on Monday.
Afterward, the New Democrats would reopen ERs at Seven Oaks General Hospital and Concordia Hospital, Kinew said.
"This is a common-sense, smart and incremental program that we are committing to today," he said outside Winnipeg's St. Boniface Hospital.
The Opposition party's latest election promise would undo what were controversial efforts that began in 2017 to cut wait times and find inefficiencies in Winnipeg's health-care system, which included closing the three Winnipeg ERs. All three currently operate as 24/7 urgent care centres.
Wait times at Winnipeg emergency departments and urgent care centres haven't dropped, however. The median wait for the past year has been 2.5 hours, well above the 1.5 hours that was reported before the first of three emergency departments was closed.
"We now have the ability as our team, as a province of Manitoba, to reject the single biggest mistake in health care that the PCs made, which was to close the three ER's," Kinew said.
The announcement comes a day after the NDP pledged to spend $500 million over four years to address health-care recruitment in Manitoba, which would include hiring 300 nurses.
Kinew said on Monday that an NDP government wouldn't build a new ER for Victoria Hospital ER until that target is met, so the new emergency departments have staff.
The Victoria Hospital project is eventually expected to include $150 million in capital costs, but only $3 million would be budgeted annually in the first few years to do consultation with experts and get the project to its first phase, he said.
The other two Winnipeg ERs are expected to come with a similar price tag, though more will be known about cost, and whether new builds or renovations are needed, after the first one is complete. All the new ERs are expected to have an annual operating cost of between $4 million and $4.8 million, Kinew said, and the hospitals will keep operating as urgent care centres.
The overall project is expected to take seven to eight years — or two terms in government, he said.
"It took the PCs seven years to break it. It might take us seven years to fix it," Kinew said.
The NDP leader has said more than once he would not reopen the ERs — including in a year-end interview with CBC in 2020, when he said it would cost too much to convert urgent-care centres back into emergency departments.
The Rachel Notley government's consumer carbon tax wound up becoming a weapon the UCP wielded to drum the Alberta NDP out of office. But that levy-and-repayment program, and the wide-ranging "climate leadership plan" around it, also stood as the NDP's boldest, provincial-reputation-altering move in their single-term tenure.