Municipal councillors pepper premier, cabinet with health care, crime questions

Premier Wab Kinew and his cabinet were bombarded with questions about crime and health care at the Association of Manitoba Municipalities’ fall convention Wednesday where the focus shifted from the usual infrastructure complaints.

Municipal councillors from across the province demanded answers from ministers about dirty needles, the need for mental-health supports closer to home and a lack of policing.

“The town continues to be littered with dirty needles and rising HIV rates,” David Moriaux, a councillor from Swan River told the NDP cabinet during the AMM “bear pit” session. The town of 4,000 has been in the public spotlight since municipal leaders questioned the distribution of free syringes and an increase in drug-related crime. The province provided the needles as a harm-reduction tool in response to a rise in HIV cases in recent years.

Moriaux said it’s been a year since the AMM passed a resolution calling for the province to stop distributing regular syringes in favour of less-hazardous retractable syringes, and for it to conduct a study on the effectiveness and consequences of harm-reduction programs.

“Neither has happened,” the Swan River deputy mayor said. “When will the province start distributing the safety-engineered retractable syringes to help alleviate public safety concerns about exposed dirty needles?”

The premier said the program was launched by the former Progressive Conservative government without a syringe cleanup plan that the NDP put in place after taking office.

“Your concerns are very, very valid,” Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara told Moriaux.

“We want to make sure that we’re taking the most up to speed, up to date public health approaches, including looking at updating the needles that are accessible in communities and an overall approach that’s going to bring those rates down and make sure more people are connected to care in the short and the long term.”

Asagwara is expecting “next steps” to be taken in December and January.

A councillor in the Westman region said the wait for mental-health services is so long that families are driving to distant communities, waiting up to two years to get help or simply going without care. Young people without the consistent support they need are at a higher risk for substance use and addictions later on, she said.

Kinew said the province recognizes the added challenges rural communities face and is adding more mental-health resources.

The health minister, a registered psychiatric nurse who was a clinician specializing in youth services for many years, acknowledged the gap in services.

“I saw the overwhelming disparity between what you can access in the city in urban settings versus rural… which is totally unacceptable,” Asagwara said, adding the province is “working so hard to close that gap.”

“We’re training more psychologists and folks in this area and making sure we’re creating those opportunities in rural Manitoba, in northern Manitoba.”

Altona municipal councillor and former police chief Perry Batchelor said since the Brandon Mental Health Centre closed nearly 30 years ago there’s been a desperate need for more mental-health treatment beds.

“Nothing has happened,” said Batchelor, who was a police officer from 1997 until he retired in 2022.

“When police officers show up at the hospital with the mental-health patient, the first thing the doctor is doing is trying to find a bed,” he said. “Nine times out of 10, that is not found. Therefore, police are transporting as far as Thompson a mental-health patient.”

Batchelor implored the province to act on a new AMM resolution calling for more mental-health beds and an updated Mental Health Act to end the over-reliance on RCMP for transporting patients.

“No police officer wants to be put in that situation,” he said.

Kinew assured the municipalities that the province is investing in more mental-health capacity in Winnipeg and elsewhere in Manitoba, including updated legislation to detain intoxicated persons for up to 72 hours when they’re in drug psychosis and posing a public safety risk.

A new sobering centre will soon open to detain them, the premier said.

“We’ve got a lot of police officers sitting in the waiting room babysitting people right now,” Kinew said. “We’d rather have them out in the community, keeping people safe.”

He also pointed to a meth task force announced in last week’s throne speech to go after traffickers.

Progressive Conservative justice critic Wayne Balcaen said the province needs to advocate for more police in rural Manitoba, where RCMP vacancies are among the highest in the country.

“People are screaming with the rise in crime under the NDP and what’s been happening here, the rural issues that are happening,” the former Brandon police chief said in an interview at the AMM convention.

Balcaen said the province is announcing “specialty sections” without the police resources in place to run them.

“The RCMP can’t keep up with their staffing now and they certainly can’t staff up these specialty sections, like this new meth task force,” the member for Brandon West said.

It’s been just over a year since the province announced funding for an RCMP three-officer general investigation section for the Swan River Valley that hasn’t come to fruition, Balcaen said, adding a promised four-person crime-reduction unit in Thompson hasn’t materialized, he said.

“It’s nice to make the announcements but you’ve got to actually have the bodies and the ability to do this.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca