View From the Legislature

Manitoba patients waiting for much needed cataract surgeries are wondering why the NDP government is putting politics before their needs after learning that hundreds of surgeries are being postponed. This past week, patients who were scheduled to have cataract surgery with Vision Group in Winnipeg were told that because the NDP government had cut their contract for surgical procedures, their scheduled cataract procedures were being postponed for months.

In fact, it was reported this week that the number of cataract surgeries being funded by the provincial government to Vision Group has been cut by the NDP from 5,400 in 2023-24 to just 1,250 this year. Overall in the province, this resulted in fewer surgeries being funded this year under the NDP than the previous year under the former Progressive Conservative government.

How is it that after all the NDP promises on healthcare, that surgeries are being cut and wait times are growing? The answer is found in the fact that the NDP are cutting contracts with private clinics even if it means that Manitobans will wait months longer for needed care. To try to address the surgical backlogs that grew when many surgeries were cancelled during the pandemic, the Progressive Conservative government contracted with private clinics like Vision Group and the Western Surgical Centre to help reduce wait times for procedures like cataract surgeries. And this approach was working.

Yet, upon coming into government the NDP began cutting contracts for surgeries with out of province providers and private in province providers without increasing capacity in other ways. Not surprisingly, this has resulted in wait times for surgeries growing even longer.

To be clear, while contracts were made with private clinics, they were publicly funded. Manitobans simply provided their Manitoba Health Card and the procedure was publicly funded. Manitobans were not paying out of pocket. The only difference was that in these cases the provider of the surgical services were private entities. And this seems to be what the NDP objected to, even if it was cutting down the wait times for Manitobans by months. It appears that the NDP would rather Manitobans wait in pain or with a deteriorating standard of living, than provide public funding to private entities even for a short period of time.

Over the past several months, Manitoba Progressive Conservatives have been asking the NDP what they were planning to do with the contracts with Manitoba private surgical providers. As one of their first actions as a new government, they cut the out of province surgical program that was allowing Manitobans to access knee and hip surgeries more quickly. By doing so, they relegated many Manitobans to months of living in pain without any action to increase surgery options in Manitoba.

Given this action, there was concern that the NDP would also be looking to scale back on publicly funded surgeries at Manitoba private clinics. And while they wouldn’t acknowledge that publicly, this week patients waiting for cataract surgeries from some private clinics began receiving letters that their scheduled surgeries would be delayed by months because of the NDP cutting back on these procedures.

This is a far cry from what the NDP promised Manitobans last fall in the provincial election. No where did they campaign on reducing surgeries, reducing surgery options and growing the wait times for surgeries. Unfortunately, by prioritizing politics over patients, that is exactly what many Manitobans are now experiencing.