Right in the Centre: Home grown solutions please
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- Published on Thursday, January 19, 2017
By Ken Waddell
Neepawa Bannner/Neepawa Press
Premier Brian Pallister was in Neepawa last Monday to attend a tribute for retired MLA Stu Briese. The accolades brought to Briese by Pallister and many others were well deserved. The large crowd in attendance paid a fitting tribute to Briese’s career as an MLA and as a long-time municipal councillor.
Pallister also took the opportunity to speak about the upcoming provincial budget. Faced with a $1 billion deficit this year and a long list of needs and demands for spending, on both programs and infrastructure, Pallister and his 39 MLAs are faced with a big problem.
Health care is where the biggest demands are, it’s 40 per cent of the budget. The federal government is planning to lower annual increases in health care from six per cent to three. The feds are faced with a $30 billion deficit. Pallister says over 70 per cent of government expenses is made up of wages. Both Pallister and Trudeau have a problem. Manitoba needs more money and they and the feds are both in a deficit position.
The problem is huge. If Pallister cuts staffing, the individuals and the unions will howl. There doesn’t seem to be any more appetite for tax increases and besides, every time the taxes go up, the economy shrinks. A very new and perhaps harsh approach has to be taken. I say harsh but with reservation. Perhaps the better word is realistic. We have to look after the most vulnerable people. We have people with long term medical needs. There are many people who are in care, including the elderly and the disabled, that we have to provide for and do so without any hesitation.
Manitoba needs to balance the budget in order to restore its twice diminished credit rating. Every time the credit rating falls, the cost of borrowing goes up. That is “dead” money, it goes straight to the deficit with nothing to show for it.
Manitoba needs better roads, schools, hospitals and care homes. The cost of health care is very high and so is education, but not nearly so high as not having good health care and education.
The government needs to look at where our money goes. How many doctors do we train, but better, yet how many do we retain? There is gap there for sure and some answers are needed. We have a retention problem with high school and university students as well. It costs every community about $100,000 to educate a student from K-12. How many stay in the community or come back after further education? Not a very high percentage unfortunately. It’s the same for the province as a whole.
Many people don’t want to face the reality of health care spending. Manitoba should allow private health care providers. Much of health care is already privately supplied and that whole can of worms needs to be opened up. Why not have CAT Scans, MRIs and just about everything else opened up to private investment. It is absolutely cruel and stupid that those who can’t afford diagnostics are held in a long waiting list by people who may be able to afford to pay for a privately funded test. Absolutely ridiculous!
Assisted living centres are badly needed. They can be privately funded and should be built as soon as possible. The community built medical clinic concept has certainly worked well at Neepawa and has not had one cent of provincial or federal money put into it.
On the educational front, if the province allocated the per student cost for education and capital funding to each student in a straight forward, annual, per student funding, they could budget for both operations and capital expenses. That would be way too simple for the bean counters of the world but let’s say it came to $10,000 per student operationally and $1,000 annually for capital. Then the divisions would know what they could afford over the next 20-30 years. As it is, on both the operational side and the capital side, the province meddles so much that local boards and officials spend all their time wrangling with the government bureaucracy. Basically, if the schools boards are in charge, the province should give them the allocated budget, both on the capital side and operationally, on a per student basis and get out of the way. If the province wants to run the whole show, then do away with the school boards. I hope that doesn’t happen as the bigger the bureaucracy, the poorer the decisions you get.
