Two months into COVID-19, Manitoba has gotten off relatively unscathed. By April 28, the province has had just 272 cases and 6 deaths, numbers more in range of the smaller Maritime provinces. However, Conservative Premier Brian Pallister isn’t looking to sit idly by while a perfectly good crisis goes to waste.
Pallister has proposed wide-ranging public-sector cuts, including reduced work weeks for “non-essential” workers, requesting Crown corporations, universities and more to create plans for implementing 10%, 20%, and 30% job cuts during the pandemic. This proposal has quickly taken the form of an ultimatum, with workers forced to choose between reduced hours and temporary layoffs. For Manitoba universities, these proposed personnel cuts come despite having already laid off hundreds of employees, while online classes forge ahead at nearly full-scale.
The Premier has also tried to get public sector unions on board, to lobby Ottawa for federal support. However, the Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union has said they won’t participate in lobbying without basic details of Pallister’s plan, such as which workers would be affected, by how much, and for how long. Additionally, municipalities are being asked to cut back on service provision, and focus only on “essential services.” This includes a review of funding to non-profits, with the province looking to reduce or eliminate funding to those organizations that provide “non-essential” services.
What we can see here is an obsession with the “essential.” While bolstering health care is obviously the frame through which these cuts are being proposed, there is little, if any, agreement beyond that on what services are essential. However, this government’s concern for health care is new. Less than year ago in May 2019 workers were resisting health cuts This unnecessary austerity is made all the more confusing in light of the decision by another staunch conservative, Doug Ford, to put money into public services, to stem the damage of COVID-19. Manitoba’s cuts are driven by ideology not sound policies.
Since Manitoba so far has not faced the same health emergency as other provinces, this crisis will primarily hit the economy. From Trudeau on down, the message being pushed is “we’re all in this together,” a kind of wartime, “belt-tightening” rhetoric. We must be suspicious of this message coming from capitalist governments of any kind, conservative ones in particular, especially regarding social service cuts. What constitutes an “essential service” has more to do with who is receiving the services, than with the services themselves.
Last week, Pallister made news saying that he would take a 25% pay cut, to show solidarity as he requested other public sector employees also take a hit. Even this gesture has proven more PR than sacrifice. The cut only applies to Pallister’s $94,000 salary as an MLA, but not to the additional $79,000 he makes as the Premier. In real terms, Brian Pallister’s pay cut will be around 8%. The Premier’s finances have been the object of scrutiny before, from his 2012 purchase of a $2 million, 9,000 square foot mansion with a basketball court and seven-car garage, or revelations about millions of dollars of property holdings in notoriously low tax Costa Rica.
It is clear that Brian Pallister doesn’t have the same class interests as working people and those who need access to the social services he is trying to deem non-essential and therefore, cut.
Implementing austerity serves to solidify and preserve existing social order. Manitoba hasn’t been hit too hard by COVID-19, but the lasting economic repercussions will do serious damage if not mitigated. The solution to huge private sector unemployment is not to decrease public sector spending and employment. The public sector should be picking up the slack, becoming more robust in a time of unprecedented federal government spending, rather than joining the private sector in its contraction.
If we’ve learned one thing from the pandemic, it’s the value of well-funded, well-prepared, well-staffed social services. The devastation of COVID-19 has been multiplied by holes in the social safety net, and cuts like these will only amplify the coming secondary rounds of COVID-19, or future crises, where Manitobans are more affected. Pallister is taking advantage of a crisis that has been extremely gentle, relatively speaking, with the Manitoba population, to drive through unnecessary cuts. Even if the virus doesn’t hit harder in Manitoba, these cuts are cruel and potentially devastating to Manitoba’s most vulnerable populations.
