Doer touts 5-point plan

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This article was published 06/05/2003 (8437 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PREMIER Gary Doer yesterday revealed a five-point re-election plan that promised to further reduce taxes, hire more doctors and nurses and make significant reductions in surgical and diagnostic waiting lists.

It is a plan that in style, tone and theme is almost identical to the slow and steady approach that Doer and the NDP used to win a majority government in 1999.

Doer acknowledged the platform he unveiled yesterday echoes his 1999 plan, but noted each of the promises in this campaign will eventually form a fresh mandate if he wins a second term.

And Doer said he wants to stress, most of all, that he will cost all of his campaign promises to make sure they are affordable. Doer has strenuously criticized rivals for making what he believes are unsupportable spending promises.

“We’re not providing gimmicks to voters,” Doer said yesterday in Gimli. “We’re providing doable plans.”

The 2003 NDP promise to reduce waiting lists — which Doer said would be the focus of this year’s platform — in particular echoes promises made in the 1999 campaign, but with an important difference.

In 1999, Doer promised to “end” hallway medicine. Although the NDP has claimed to have “significantly” lowered the number of hallway patients, Doer’s inability to eliminate the practice has given rivals a point of attack.

Doer denied he was deliberately trying to steer clear of using the word “end” in this year’s campaign, although he said he would always like to offer “modest” promises and then show the public they can be exceeded.

Exact details of the NDP plan to reduce waiting lists, and four other points in his campaign platform, will be revealed in the days to come.

In addition to health care, Doer said he will focus attention on the economy, education, public safety and fiscal management.

Doer confirmed he will offer additional tax relief, although for the current year it is unlikely to exceed the six per cent tax cut for middle-income Manitobans announced in last month’s provincial budget, and which takes effect in January 2004.

Additional tax cuts, Doer noted, will probably be focused on the years beyond.

Doer is also promising to train more nurses, technologists and doctors, improve accessibility and infrastructure of public and post-secondary education, hike the minimum wage on a regular basis and hire more police officers and Crown prosecutors.

Doer also included, as his fifth plank, a promise to continue what he described as his government’s cautious approach to managing the economy. The NDP has thwarted those who wanted larger tax cuts by making substantial payments on the provincial debt, including a multibillion-dollar civil service pension liability.

Yesterday was also a day when all three of Manitoba’s political parties focused their election campaigns on health care, and an increasingly testy debate over how best to reduce the chronic problem of waiting lists.

Liberal Leader Jon Gerrard promised to create a body called Cardiac Care Manitoba, which would combine surgical care, medical care, prevention, research and other related health professionals under one roof.

Tory Leader Stuart Murray yesterday pledged to have the government purchase more surgeries and diagnostic services at private clinics to relieve waiting lists.

Murray’s latest health-care announcement was delivered in an operating suite at the Maples Surgical Centre on Jefferson Avenue, the same clinic that led the NDP to pass a law banning overnight stays at private hospitals. He said a Tory government would consider overturning that law and will pay more private clinics to deliver diagnostic tests and day surgeries.

“The purchaser needs to be public but the provider does not always have to be,” Murray said.

Currently, Manitoba has only one contract with a private clinic to provide day surgeries but Murray said there is no reason private clinics providing a range of services shouldn’t also be allowed into the system.

NDP MLA and campaign spokesman Tim Sale said the Tories have no evidence private health care is better. “This is pure Conservative ideology,” Sale said.

Sale said the Tories’ own research showed cataract surgery wait lists went up when the private sector was brought in and that the Romanow report based on more than a year of research found no support that private health care was cheaper or more efficient.

Meanwhile, Gerrard took a shot at NDP Health Minister Dave Chomiak for being unaware when a number of heart patients died earlier this year waiting for surgery. Manitoba’s cardiac surgery program came under fire in February when the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority revealed that three patients have died since last July while waiting for heart surgery.

“Over the last while, we’ve seen (cardiac care) problems continue,” Gerrard said during his announcement yesterday at CancerCare Manitoba.

	dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca
	mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca
	leah.janzen@freepress.mb.ca