News Releases

The Manitoba government, directly and through provincial health-care employers, has invested over $1.8 billion in compensation increases for our dedicated physicians, nurses, allied health community and facility support staff, professional, technical and paramedical workers, medical residents and interns, and physician and clinical assistants, Health Minister Audrey Gordon announced today.

“We have made massive investments to recognize the vital importance of our health-care providers for all Manitobans through collective and service agreements for over 60,000 health-care workers across all health workforce sectors,” said Gordon. “These agreements not only reflect the contributions our incredible health-care workers make each and every day to support patient care, but they also maintain Manitoba’s competitive position to retain, train and recruit new health-care professionals well into the future.”

These historic funding increases occur through the conclusion of an entire bargaining and negotiation cycle with the bargaining agents representing 100 per cent of the province’sdedicated health workforce, with all collective and service agreements reached voluntarily across every health-care human resource sector. All deliver fair, compounding annual increases – as well as other monetary gains and non-monetary improvements – to support recognition, retention, advancement, education and training, staff wellness and recruitment, the minister noted.

There was a fundamental need to consolidate and restructure a dysfunctional bargaining unit framework, the minister noted, which reduced the fully concluded collective agreements by 82 percent to 36 collective agreements from the 200 in the health-care system in May 2016. The 2016 volume had no parallel anywhere else in the country, it was operationally problematic, a barrier to optimizing patient care and needed to be more manageable for bargaining purposes, the minister added. The required statutory restructuring process – with implementation directed and overseen by an independent commissioner – meant bargaining could not get underway until the end of 2020 when the consolidation process was largely complete.

“Our government reformed a dysfunctional bargaining unit system and has successfully delivered a rational and streamlined structure for the benefit of patients, residents and clients,” added Gordon. “While fixing these inherited challenges caused unfortunate and unavoidable delay, the new framework has delivered significant retroactive pay through all collective agreements while providing a new foundation going forward that is better for all health-care workers and employers.”