COLUMN: Think Again – Things are getting worse under the NDP

“We elected a strong team of New Democrats to fix healthcare and make your life more affordable.”

That is how newly elected Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew started his election night victory speech on Oct. 3, 2023. Now, two-and-a-half years into his government’s mandate, it’s time to ask whether Kinew has made good on his promise.

He hasn’t.

On most observable metrics, health care is demonstrably worse now than it was before the NDP took power. For example, emergency room wait times are now so high that the government recently had to promise to update its online wait time trackers. It turns out the estimates they provided were often far below the actual wait times experienced by patients.

That’s assuming, of course, that the emergency room is even open at all. In many parts of the province, emergency rooms have either closed entirely or have only limited hours. It’s not a good look for a party that promised to fix healthcare.

In addition, waiting lists for important diagnostic tests remain unacceptably long. For example, if you need a CT scan, the median wait time was 11 weeks in 2025 compared to seven weeks in 2023. It’s even worse if you are waiting for an MRI, where the median wait time in 2025 was 26 weeks compared to 20 weeks in 2023.

To make matters worse, nurses in three hospitals (Health-Sciences, St. Boniface, and Thompson General) voted overwhelmingly to grey-list these facilities due to serious safety concerns.

The fact that the Manitoba Nurses Union, an organization that openly supports the NDP in provincial election campaigns, is calling out the NDP for their terrible management of healthcare tells us that things must be really bad.

As for Kinew’s promise to make our lives more affordable, the numbers tell a different story. The Kinew government ended the indexation of income tax rates, which means that Manitobans lose purchasing power every year as inflation pushes them into a higher tax bracket. The result is we have less disposable income than we did before.

To make matters worse, education taxes continue to rise. Instead of continuing with the previous government’s plan to phase out the education property tax, the NDP gave carte blanche to tax increases. As a result, homeowners across the province are being hit with double-digit tax increases as school boards struggle to keep up with inflation. This makes home ownership less affordable than before.

It doesn’t help that the NDP is nowhere close to balancing the budget. While the NDP inherited a balanced budget from the previous government, annual deficits have since ballooned in size. The projected deficit for the current fiscal year is $1.6 billion, up from the original forecast of $794 million. The NDP blamed this deficit on the cost of fighting wildfires even though this expense accounted for less than half of the increase.

Deficits matter because they lead to higher debt payments. As debt payments continue to rise, it becomes harder for governments to protect important social programs and maintain necessary infrastructure spending.

Midway through his election night speech, Kinew made the following request. “If after a few years, we have improved your health care and we’ve made your life a bit more affordable, I would humbly ask that in four years’ time you send more people from your communities to sit with our team.”

It’s become clear that Kinew has no intention of living up to his pledge. His government hasn’t improved our health care, nor has it made our lives more affordable. By Kinew’s own words, the Manitoba NDP doesn’t deserve a second term in office.

Let’s not give it one.

Michael Zwaagstra is a teacher and deputy mayor of Steinbach. He can be reached at mzwaagstra@shaw.ca.