Prairie Mountain Health board member quit before ‘they chuck the regions under the bus’

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This article was published 06/01/2025 (274 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A paramedic and municipal councillor from rural Manitoba who quit the board of Prairie Mountain Health says the provincial government is setting up the health region to take the blame for a $40-million budget shortfall.

“It’s not a political thing or an axe to grind with one party,” said David Moriaux, who resigned from the regional health authority’s board last month. He was appointed three years ago by the previous Progressive Conservative government.

Moriaux, the deputy mayor of Swan River, said the vast region covered by Prairie Mountain Health regularly goes over budget thanks to huge private nursing agency and overtime costs.

The annual overspending has been accepted by government as a necessity, he said.

The Regional Health Authorities Act requires boards to present balanced budgets. In previous years, the health authority presented a deficit budget that was accepted, and would use its reserves to cover cost overruns. Those reserves have been depleted over the years, Moriaux said Monday.

When the region presented its 2025-2026 financial blueprint in the fall, the province didn’t provide enough funding to cover the expected $40-million over-expenditure for the year ahead, Moriaux told the Free Press.

“To me, that’s just being dishonest with ratepayers and taxpayers,” he said. “If you know the cost on the front end and you know you’re going to be over, then report it that way. Don’t just lie to them and tell them, ‘It’s going to be this cost,’ and tell them 12 months later, ‘We’re over budget by $40 million’…. I’m not going to be on the bus when they chuck the regions under the bus for these over-expenditures.”

He said he decided to resign from the board Dec. 16 after Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara and Finance Minister Adrien Sala held a news conference blaming much of the province’s $1.3-billion deficit — $513 million higher than expected — on health-care administration spending.

“What got me riled up was the ministers of health and finance got in front of the cameras and laid the blame squarely on regions… when they know that they’re not funding the regions appropriately,” Moriaux said, noting Prairie Mountain’s administration costs are among the lowest in the province.

In September, Asagwara directed health regions to reduce spending on administration by eight per cent, and that is a concern, he said.

“You can only cut that bone until there’s nothing left to trim,” he said.

Treena Slate, CEO for Prairie Mountain Health, responded to the former board member’s concerns in an email Friday after Moriaux’s resignation became public.

She confirmed the over-expenditure is largely related to agency nursing and OT costs, and said the authority continues to work with the province “to be fiscally responsible and to deliver quality patient care to residents within the region.”

Asagwara thanked Moriaux for his time and service on the board but isn’t concerned about his resignation.

“It’s important to have members on board who are excited to do this work,” Asagwara told the Free Press.

The health minister said the former government didn’t have a good working relationship with the regional authorities and did not address the soaring costs of using private, for-profit nursing agencies.

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“We believe in partnership and collaboration. Prairie Mountain Health, like other regional health authorities, was not well supported,” said Asagwara.

A critical shortage of nurses working in the public health system — many of whom went to work for private agencies, where they enjoy better pay and more flexible work schedules — has increased reliance on the expensive alternative.

“We cannot stop using private agency nurses right this second,” Asagwara said, adding the over-reliance on the for-profit sector took seven years to happen and will take more than a year or two to fix.

“We have to do the work to retain and train more nurses.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

Carol Sanders is a reporter at the Free Press legislature bureau. The former general assignment reporter and copy editor joined the paper in 1997. Read more about Carol.

Every piece of reporting Carol produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.