Spending increase important step for health care

AS supporters of public health care, the Manitoba Health Coalition welcomes the increased investments that Budget 2026 promises to the health-care system.

The projected increase in spending for health, seniors and long-term care of over 10 per cent is a promising step forward and will help restore provincial health-care funding to the 2016-17 levels. This investment will help the health-care system recover from years of austerity and cuts.

At the same time, returning to 2016 levels of spending after nearly a decade of inflation and population growth is only a start. Targeted actions in key areas of health care and truly transformative spending measures are missing from the budget.

There is very little about addressing the costly private sector health care delivery — beyond a brief mention of expanding the Provincial Travel Nurses Team to help draw nurses back into the public system and away from private, for-profit agencies. While the government reports it has reduced American contracting by 30 per cent, a concrete plan to remove American influence from our health care system must be a priority.

It is not enough just to fund health care, we need to fund the public delivery of health care so that the money goes to care, not profits. Continuing to rely on private agencies, not just for nurses, but all health-care workers, is inefficient and worsens patient outcomes.

In terms of the social determinants of health, the budget does contain some efforts to expand social and affordable housing, and other laudable measures like making child care free for low-income families, but these investments alone do not go far enough.

Increased funding is needed to meet the need for more social housing, more harm-reduction services and treatment for addictions, and greater funding focused on supporting vulnerable communities. Not enough is done in the budget to address poverty and inequality, which are key drivers of illness and rising health-care costs.

Meaningful action to address structural racism in health care also goes unmentioned.

Structural racism is a key barrier for Indigenous, Black and other racialized Manitobans from accessing and receiving quality health care. In light of the race, ethnicity and Indigenous identity data released by Shared Health in June 2025, showing Black and Indigenous patients wait longer to be seen and leave more often without being seen/against medical advice in Winnipeg ERs, we hoped to see more concrete investments to address these ongoing harms.

Direct spending connected to the promised patient safety charter is missing from the budget, although those details may yet follow. To expand and improve patient advocacy services, provide more translators, and other supports to help patients safely navigate the health-care system, more funding is needed. It will be important to see the province and regional health authorities work together to ensure that there is adequate funding to redesign existing patient navigation and support roles to have a more concrete advocacy focus.

The success of this new patient safety charter will depend on the details, such as how the rights of patients will be enforced. A patient safety charter, if done right, could be a very valuable tool. As health care advocates, the Manitoba Health Coalition looks forward to more details on spending related to this important initiative.

Another important area of spending, this time entirely absent from the budget, is a funding commitment to restore international students’ public health care coverage. This is a big misstep and will make it harder for Manitoba to attract international students to come and study here. Compared to other provinces, the Canadian Health Coalition has found that Manitoba offers the worst health coverage for international students, having lost their access to the public system in 2018.

Investing over $5 million in supervised consumption is an important and much needed budget line, but more money is needed to build a harm reduction strategy across the province with more access to treatment and to help establish multiple supervised consumption sites needed across the city and province as a whole.

Increasing health spending by 10.3 per cent is certainly an important and much-needed step forward in the project of rebuilding Manitoba’s health-care system.

But this project must continue to expand in the coming years and budgets if we hope to finish that rebuilding project and go beyond it to develop a truly just, accessible, and universal health-care system in Manitoba.

Noah Schulz is the provincial director of the Manitoba Health Coalition.