Battered, broke Manitobans watch reality steamroll political promises in 2025

If 2025 will be remembered for anything in Manitoba, it will be for the clash between political ambition and hard economic reality.

It was the year when governments at all levels pledged big reforms — in health care, budgeting and public safety — only to find themselves overtaken by forces larger than legislation or municipal budgets. And the most powerful of those forces came from the south.

The year began with warning flares about a possible trade confrontation with the United States. By spring, the warnings became a full-blown crisis.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs — covering everything from Canadian steel and aluminum to agricultural goods and manufactured products — triggered a deep economic shock for Manitoba and for Canada.

Even after a summer of frantic negotiations, retaliatory measures and emergency federal aid packages, the province’s economy was left gasping for air. Manitoba’s export-heavy economy isn’t built to withstand that kind of sustained pressure.

The tariffs weren’t just punitive — they were strangling.

But economic turmoil wasn’t the only storyline shaping 2025.

Premier Wab Kinew spent part of the year musing about the theoretical benefits of calling an early provincial election. It was an unnecessary distraction. With polls showing the NDP more popular in 2025 than the day they won in 2023, and with the opposition in no position to fight a campaign, there was no strategic rationale for an early vote.

The government’s real job was managing a health-care system strained to its limit and an economy punched in the gut by American protectionism — not daydreaming about an election two years ahead of schedule.

And health care, once again, dominated headlines for all the wrong reasons.

This was the year the government promised to legislate a “patient safety charter,” implement mandatory staff-to-patient ratios and end compulsory overtime for nurses. Those promises made for impressive talking points.

But the proposed measures risk becoming symbolic unless the province designs real enforcement mechanisms around them. Good intentions do little for patients waiting 14 hours in ERs or nurses juggling dangerously high caseloads.

Meanwhile, on the front lines, conditions deteriorated enough for the Manitoba Nurses Union to “grey list” Thompson General Hospital — the second facility in the province to receive that designation (Health Sciences Centre was the first).

When 97 per cent of nurses vote to warn colleagues against working at a hospital due to safety concerns, it signals a system operating beyond capacity, regardless of what’s written in legislation.

And while the province was wrestling with health care, Ottawa introduced a crisis of its own making. When the federal government declined to renew the Working Together to Improve Health Care targeted funding, it effectively cut provincial health budgets, even as demand skyrocketed. The Canada Health Transfer may rise modestly each year, but that increase is dwarfed by inflation, wage pressures and population growth. Manitoba needed more support in 2025 — not less.

Then came the national embarrassment: Canada losing its measles-elimination status. Vaccine misinformation, a patchwork immunization registry, waning primary-care access and years of underfunding combined into a preventable failure. Manitoba was particularly vulnerable, and the year’s outbreaks forced public health to confront the consequences of neglecting basic immunization infrastructure.

Municipal governments didn’t escape scrutiny, either.

Winnipeg’s 2026 budget — which included a 3.5 per cent property tax increase, a transit fare hike and plans to add 135 new full-time staff — wasn’t the fiscal revitalization city hall tried to frame it as.

It was survival budgeting. Even with the tax and fee increases, the city barely held the line on essential services. Emergency services alone absorbed much of the new spending, leaving little room to tackle long-standing infrastructure deficits.

The most damning revelation came in the form of a sewage-capacity crisis. Winnipeggers learned in 2025 that, without the final phase of the North End Sewage Treatment Plant upgrade, the city could run out of waste-water capacity within seven years. That isn’t a planning oversight — it’s a catastrophic failure of municipal foresight.

City planners have access to population projections. They knew growth was accelerating. Yet, arguably the single most critical infrastructure project in Winnipeg fell years behind schedule.

On the public-safety front, RCMP body cameras continued to prove their worth. When a fatal shooting on a northern First Nation was investigated this year, body-cam footage — used in court for only the second time in Manitoba — provided clear, objective evidence about what unfolded.

Meanwhile, the City of Winnipeg’s continued resistance to embrace that technology for its police force looks increasingly out of step with public expectations and modern policing standards.

But as much as local issues shaped the year, it was the U.S. trade war that cast the longest shadow. By the fall, the province’s economic outlook had been revised downward.

All of which made fighting one of the province’s worst wildfire seasons on record in 2025 that much more difficult to pay for.

So what did 2025 teach us? That promises, legislation and bold messaging mean little when the real world intervenes. That governments that fail to plan for predictable crises — whether in health care, infrastructure or trade — eventually pay the price. And that Manitobans expect more than slogans from their governments. They expect results.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca