NDP’s lethargic, incomplete responses to HSC nurses’ safety concerns politically short-sighted

Opinion

Has Manitoba’s NDP government fallen prey to the political butterfly effect?

Originated by a mathematician in the 1970s, the butterfly effect suggests that a seemingly unimportant decision can, over time, produce severe and unpredictable consequences.

Applied to the NDP’s current challenge with security at the Health Sciences Centre, it appears that a failure to respond more urgently and aggressively to concerns at Manitoba’s largest hospital has created a whole host of unintended practical and political outcomes.

Let’s go back to November 2023, arguably a point at which the fateful decision was made.

Premier Wab Kinew’s government was just a month old when the Manitoba Nurses Union filed a grievance over safety concerns in parkades and surface parking lots surrounding the HSC campus. Nurses’ concerns included threats of violence and frequent vandalism affecting their personal vehicles.

At the time, it was easy for the incoming NDP government to lay off this specific problem on the outgoing Progressive Conservative government. History will show the Tories failed miserably to respond to nurses’ safety concerns, promising but never delivering on a plan to deploy specially trained institutional safety officers inside HSC facilities and across its core-area campus.

As the grievance worked its way through the arbitration process, Shared Health — the province’s central health-care agency — and government tried to respond to the safety concerns. Safety officers (ISOs) were trained and deployed along with private security, both inside HSC facilities and throughout the campus, with a focus on parking garages and surface lots. Weapons scanners would also be deployed and security cameras have been installed.

Unfortunately, these efforts, while hardly insignificant, have not made a measurable impact on safety concerns.

In April 2024, just as the province was deploying its ISOs, the arbitrator in the above-mentioned grievance reported that HSC staff faced “an unacceptable level of risk” in the broader campus surrounding HSC facilities. More importantly, the arbitrator gave Shared Health 30 days to come up with a safety plan for HSC.

That recommendation was startling, as it suggested Shared Health did not have a comprehensive safety plan in place. That is not to say there was not a broad array of security measures in place. However, there is more than enough anecdotal evidence to at least raise the question about the existence of an overall, well-considered plan.

Surely, the arbitrator’s findings would have acted as a wake-up call for the new government. Recognizing the safety concerns that had been created by the Tories’ inaction, Kinew’s team would have moved quickly to develop a comprehensive plan to quickly and robustly address the security issues.

The chronology of events suggests that did not happen.

The government has done plenty, but it has trickled out in a maddeningly iterative fashion. At no point was there ever an announcement by Shared Health or the health minister about a multi-pronged, comprehensive security plan.

Not surprisingly, complaints about random violence and vandalism have continued while the incidents have grown more serious in nature.

In July, a 28-year-old man sexually assaulted four women and a teenage girl at various locations around the campus. He was arrested shortly after the assaults, but questions remain about why existing security measures did not deter the attacks and why an alert was not issued to staff in real time.

Those incidents unleashed another iteration of safety measures, including additional security personnel and a program to accompany HSC staff to safely get to their vehicles.

Do the government’s responses add up to a comprehensive plan? Nurses were not convinced. In August, the MNU revealed that 94 per cent of its members at HSC had voted to “grey list” the facility, effectively announcing the union would discourage current or new nurses from accepting jobs or taking available shifts there until its demands for meaningful safety measures were implemented.

In response, earlier this week Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara announced a decision to staff HSC’s emergency department with two Winnipeg Police Service officers on a 24-7 basis. It’s a good idea but one wonders why it was not done two years ago.

The MNU called it “a step in the right direction.”

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It would not be unfair to say that the decisions made two years ago, early in the NDP government’s first term, are now producing negative and unintended consequences.

In practical terms, the failure to more aggressively address security problems at HSC has undermined the government’s efforts to recruit more nurses and convince them to fill shifts at the province’s most important hospital.

Politically, the government’s failure to address this issue more forcefully has put the NDP in conflict with the MNU, one of its most important political allies. Kinew won the 2023 election, in large part, on his pledge to restore the health-care system and win back the trust of nurses.

While the former challenge is still a work in progress, it appears nurses have less trust in the premier and his ministers than they did in 2023. An unintended consequence of not delivering a more comprehensive and effective plan when it was most needed.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca

Dan Lett
Columnist

Dan Lett is a columnist for the Free Press, providing opinion and commentary on politics in Winnipeg and beyond. Born and raised in Toronto, Dan joined the Free Press in 1986.  Read more about Dan.

Dan’s columns are built on facts and reactions, but offer his personal views through arguments and analysis. The Free Press’ editing team reviews Dan’s columns before they are posted online or published in print — part of the our tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.