Right in the centre- Realistic options
- Details
- Published on Thursday, February 23, 2017
By Ken Waddell
The Neepawa Banner
It’s time to call a spade a spade. We need to shift our thinking in how we fund and administer government services across Manitoba. The bottom line is that towns, villages and RMs have to find their sweet spot and work with that. Not every town is going to have every service, that has become painfully obvious in the past 50 years. Rural Manitoba towns have suffered horrendous declines in population and services in that time frame.
A number of years ago, a study was done in Saskatchewan that stated that the province had about 14 regional centres. It went on to suggest that each of those centres should be designated as a centre for all government services, municipal, provincial and federal. It made sense. Tossing out that study was an error. No such study has been done in Manitoba, that I am aware of. It doesn’t need to be done. It is already painfully obvious that the process should be adopted in Manitoba.
Manitoba’s delivery and administration of government services should be divided into a few regions. In south-western Manitoba, service centres should be designated at Brandon, Virden, Killarney, Neepawa and Russell. The five service centres in south-western Manitoba should also be the centre for administering education and all other government services.
There should be as fully serviced a hospital as possible in each of those towns. In the other towns that currently have a hospital, they need to have their hospitals re-designated as paramedic ambulance centres. That needs to happen by design rather than by default, as it has been declining into that situation for years. Wherever possible, a specialization unit like the one at Rivers hospital should be established. Manitoba has 74 hospitals and it’s just not sustainable. In many cases, hospitals, by default, have become specialty centres, mostly care homes.
It is time to admit to the reality that not all services can be administered in every centre and to continue to pretend to do so will only hinder real growth. Maybe south-western Manitoba can sustain five hospitals, each with an emergency room and use many of the other facilities for paramedic centres and an accompanying specialty service. If we can achieve that, we will be doing well.
Economics has spoken in a loud voice across our region, all the while, being shaped by demographics. Young people increasingly are migrating to the larger centres or out of province. Any place that has seen significant economic growth, it has been somewhat fuelled by non-Canadian workers. To fully develop and utilize our resources, we need more and more people. Given the major pinch we have in municipal and provincial budgets, we simply cannot supply every service in every community. The large scale farm equipment companies figured that out a long time ago. The first government to implement such a policy will not be popular. But economic reality must come into play and the sooner the better. Popular or not, these five centres need to be designated as such.
South-western Manitoba has too many limping hospitals, too many school boards and yes, too many municipalities. The current trend is simply not affordable and it makes no sense to pretend that it does.
If each of the five designated centres were given one envelope funding from the province and the federal government and the mandate to serve their area, then perhaps there could be some real efficiencies in the operation of government services.
Some people, in fact most people, will be rankled by this proposal, but the reality needs to be examined. The number of municipalities and councils, the number of school divisions and trustees gives us an unsustainable ratio of councillors to ratepayers or an unsustainable ratio of admin to students. The number of hospitals that can’t be fully staffed is astounding. There are hospitals in south-western Manitoba that are running close to half the designated staffing levels. All hospitals and care homes are significantly short of staff.
Senior levels of government, especially the province, need to balance their budget, that is critical. Trying to do everything, to be everything, in every community is no longer an option. It has only been a pretend option for a long time and the time has come to quit pretending.
