NDP making good on Victoria ER campaign promise, Kinew announces

On the second anniversary of his party’s provincial election win Friday, Premier Wab Kinew said the government is keeping its campaign promise to restore the Victoria General Hospital’s emergency department.

Former premier Brian Pallister closed the ER in 2017 during his Progressive Conservative government’s tumultuous health system overhaul.

Kinew, flanked by most members of the NDP caucus told a news conference outside the hospital Friday that a contract to build the new ER is set to be awarded next month.

Construction is slated to start in January 2026, and the ER is expected to open in the first half of 2027, he said.

“This is a fast-growing part of our province and it deserves to have its own emergency room,” the premier said, adding the 2017 closure was among the worst things the Tories did.

The province earmarked $3.5 million in the 2025-2026 budget to begin design work for the emergency department and a mature women’s health centre, which was also closed by the PCs.

The hospital’s urgent-care centre will remain open during the construction of the ER that will replace it, Kinew said.

“One of the things we heard in our consultations with nurses and other people on the front lines is, ‘Please don’t turn our workplace into a work site, a construction site,’” the premier said.

Health Minister Uzoma Asagwara said there are nearly 60 new staff working at the hospital than there were two years ago.

“New facilities matter, but it’s the doctors, the nurses, the allied health-care professionals, the aides and the staff who make a difference each and every day,” Asagwara said, noting the government has hired more than 3,400 net new health-care workers since the 2023 election. “That’s why staffing was the very first and biggest priority.”

The hospital’s interim chief operating officer said for years staff have been providing excellent care in spaces that were not designed to meet current demands.

“The opportunity to serve our patients and their families in an appropriate and thoughtfully designed space — it’s a bit of a dream come true for us,” Brenda Catchpole said at the news conference.

“Turning ourselves back into an emergency department” that’s new and improved “turns out to be a bit of work,” she said.

“We are currently up to our elbows in architectural drawings and draft budgets and equipment catalogs,” she said. “With the help of some amazing architects and designers, our front-line staff and their managers are designing the workspace that they need to do the best job.

“I think one of the biggest issues is going to be space — having an appropriate amount of space.”

When the return of an ER to the hospital was first announced, doctors raised concerns about a lack of clarity about acute-level beds and handling patients with intensive-care needs.

Kinew said the hospital’s ER will will have an intensive observation unit. “This is one-to-one care and intensive,” he said.

“It has the highest level of diagnostics and medical equipment at the bedside for patients. It resembles an ICU in any way that you or I would notice were we to walk into this unit.”

Doctors Manitoba, an organization that advocates on behalf of physicians in the province, said it was unable to comment Friday on the planned intensive observation unit.

“For the vast majority of emergency situations, for the vast majority of health-care needs, you are going to be able to come here… get seen by emergency-room doctors, get treated in a hospital that is right there next to your family and friends who can come and give you that support that’s so important for your healing,” Kinew said.

“The point for the average Manitoban such as you or myself is, that when you need care in an emergency, you’re no longer going to have to drive by the Victoria.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca