2023 Manitoba Election Campaign - Canadian Cancer Survivor Network

Manitoba Legislative Building

Below are the questions we have posed to Conservative, New Democratic, Liberal, and Green candidates running in the upcoming Manitoba Provincial Elections, set to take place on October 3rd, 2023. Responses will posted once they are received.

To read the full questionnaire, please click here.

If elected, how do you plan to provide post-pandemic support to address the challenges faced by cancer patients, ensuring they receive timely treatments, screenings, and the necessary supportive services?
If elected, how do you plan to ensure the effective implementation and continuous improvement of the National Framework on Cancers Linked to Firefighting Act, including measures to strengthen occupational health and safety, promote research, increase the number of cancers covered, and ensure equitable support for firefighters across Canada?
If elected, how will you ensure that women are allowed to self-refer for a mammogram, starting at age 40?
Given the potential to prevent numerous cancers through public health measures, what strategies will you implement to promote cancer prevention in Manitoba? If elected, how will you prioritize initiatives that focus on tobacco control, healthy living promotion, and awareness campaigns?

Manitoba NDP response

Dear Jackie Manthorne,

Thank you for reaching out and engaging with us in this critical election. We appreciate all that the Canadian Cancer Survivor Network (CCSN) does to advocate for families across the country.

The Manitoba NDP share your concerns about the crisis in healthcare. During seven years of austerity, the Pallister-Stefanson government cut 300 nurses in Winnipeg. They closed three Winnipeg ERs and closed the CancerCare clinics at Seven Oaks and Concordia. They cut personal care home beds instead of building 1,200 new beds as they had promised. They closed seven family health clinics in Winnipeg. They treated healthcare workers with disrespect and created the worst shortage of healthcare professionals in the province’s history.

We will take a different approach.

First, we must tackle the shortage of workers to address the challenges faced by cancer patients, to ensure they receive timely treatments, screenings, and the necessary supportive services. We will invest across the healthcare system, and specifically in cancer treatment to improve access, along with funding new team-based primary care that will play a crucial role in preventative care.

In addition to offering additional incentives to hire and retain healthcare workers in rural Manitoba, we will improve access to specialists. We will equip rural and Northern health centres with innovative health technology so doctors at the bedside can connect patients with the best specialists right away. This will reduce patient transfers and enable rural and Northern doctors to participate in team-based care. We’ll also improve rural broadband to connect rural patients with specialists following a team-based model

We have committed to build the new CancerCare Building to expand cancer services at the Health Sciences Centre. The current CancerCare building was full the day it opened in 2003, and a new building was planned to expand cancer screening, early detection, and treatment as well as capacity for clinical trials. When Heather Stefanson became Deputy Premier in 2016, one of the first things she did was cancel the project. CancerCare currently spends operating funding to rent space from other buildings just to deliver care to patients, while the lot originally set aside for the new site sits empty.

Our plan will bring the best cancer care and research under one roof, attracting leading clinical providers and researchers, bringing them together to collaborate on the latest research and treatments for patients so we can deliver world-class cancer care for every family in our province.

The Manitoba NDP will also consult further with you on how we can best strengthen occupational health and safety and ensure coverage and support for Manitoba’s firefighters. More broadly, we will continue to work with organizations like CCSN on tobacco control. We also want to promote healthy living and improve recreation options for children and adults across the province.

Once again, thanks for reaching out to us with your concerns. We look forward to working with the Canadian Cancer Survivor Network to make healthcare better, together.

Sincerely,
The Manitoba NDP

Manitoba Liberal Party Response

Question 1: If elected, how does the party plan to provide post-pandemic support to address the challenges faced by cancer patients, ensuring they receive timely treatments, screenings, and the necessary supportive services?

Response: Coming out of the pandemic, Manitoba Liberals believe that we need to have in place a Marshall Plan that helps support our healthcare and education systems. The pandemic exacerbated existing shortages in the healthcare workforce, and exposed pre-existing problems that we need to urgently solve. Capital costs need to be accompanied by the necessary human resources support to staff screenings and support services. Manitoba Liberals will prioritize the respect of the professionals working in our healthcare system whereas their work has been long devalued due to the PC government’s treatment of them in the system. Manitoba Liberals have a plan in place to recruit significantly more family doctors, and provide thank you and retention bonuses to nurses and healthcare staff to show that their work is valued within the system.

Investments in human capital of our healthcare workforce are essential to ensure cancer patients receive timely access to treatments and support.

Question 2: If elected, how does the party plan to ensure the effective implementation and continuous improvement of the National Framework on Cancers Linked to Firefighting Act, including measures to strengthen occupational health and safety, promote research, increase the number of cancers covered, and ensure equitable support for firefighters across Canada?

Response: Manitoba Liberals support evidence-based medical treatment and this includes the coverage of workplace illnesses including various types of cancers that are experienced by firefighters. We recognize that firefighters are disproportionately affected by various types of cancers as part of the hazards of their job. Manitoba Liberals are in support of these measures to ensure occupational health and safety standards are reflective of the workplace hazards that exist for firefighters.

Question 3: If elected, how does the party plan to ensure that women are allowed to self-refer for a mammogram, starting at age 40?

Response: Manitoba Liberals support self-referrals for mammograms. This is absolutely essential to ensure early detection. Part of this commitment is ensuring that we strengthen the existing capacity of specialists and medical staff, which Manitoba Liberals have committed to doing.

Question 4: Given the potential to prevent numerous cancers through public health measures, what strategies will the party work to implement to promote cancer prevention in Manitoba? If elected, how will the party prioritize initiatives that focus on tobacco control, healthy living promotion, and awareness campaigns?

Response: Education is one of the greatest tools we can use to promote cancer prevention in Manitoba. This means being proactive in addressing conventional concerns such as tobacco and alcohol in schools, but also preventative measures like active living. Manitoba Liberals have announced significant investments in strategic community infrastructure such as community and friendship centres partially as a way to boost youth involvement in sports and active living. Our commitment to stable and predictable funding for school divisions will ensure that proper educational programs and curricula continue to support these campaigns.

We thank you for your attention to these important matters, and are looking forward to your responses.

Manitoba Green Party Response

Response: We would begin by holding a number of wide-sweeping workshops to better understand the scope of our health and healthcare challenges, inviting cancer specialists, other health professionals, administrators, academics and former patients. We anticipate needing to increase capacity in the system including our facilities, notably CancerCare and our tertiary hospitals, as well as smaller clinics specializing in cancer screening, diagnosis, and treatment. We also anticipate needing to recruit and train additional healthcare professionals, such as oncologists, nurses, and radiologists, to address staffing shortages and address wait times. We should provide incentives to Manitoba students to consider pursuing healthcare careers conditioned on remaining in Manitoba to practice in their chosen fields.

During the pandemic, we saw the value and patient acceptance of telehealth and telemedical services, which should be continued and expanded to provide remote consultation and follow-up care for cancer patients, reducing the need for stressful trips into larger centres for in-person visits. Perhaps equally important, we need to provide a spectrum of supportive services, such as mental health counselling, palliative care, pain management, and rehabilitation. We need to offer support for family caregivers to help reduce the burden on those families. Patient navigation programs including patient advocates to guide patients and their families through the healthcare system would be beneficial and could be implemented with healthcare trainees. We must be cautious to ensure that health disparities are addressed, so that cancer care and support services are available equitably for all Manitobans, regardless of background, location and status. Finally, we need to update our emergency preparedness playbook, as the Climate Emergency will bring highly disruptive situations adversely affecting access to, and dramatic stresses on, our healthcare system.

Response: As mentioned earlier, we would hold wide-sweeping workshops to better understand the scope of our health and healthcare challenges. This would include learning from other jurisdictions, in this case, as recommended by local firefighter associations. We anticipate increasing the number of cancers covered and increasing occupational health and safety services. Expanding the training opportunities in occupational health in Manitoba, through our universities and colleges would be a priority. A key to successful implementation would be regular monitoring and communications with firefighter representatives.

Question 3: If elected, how does the party plan to ensure that women are allowed to self-refer for a mammogram, starting at age 40?

Response: We would consult with local experts, practicing oncologists and women's health specialists to ensure that best practices are being followed, incorporating knowledge and experience from other jurisdictions. We would anticipate that Manitobans would be allowed to self-refer for mammograms at 40yo. We would support research to evaluate the effectiveness of this policy in the early detection of cancer and improving health outcomes with the goal of ongoing refinement and improvement of the policy.

Response: The Green Party of Manitoba, in our Health & Healthcare Foundation Policy, advocates strongly for an upstream, preventative approach to health and healthcare. We understand the importance of addressing the root causes or social determinants of health, beginning with perhaps the most important of all, Poverty. We echo experts in the field that a Basic Income Guarantee would be the most significant way to reduce poverty in Manitoba. This would lead to reduced substance use (addiction), homelessness and crime and would enable more Manitobans to live in dignity, with far less stress and the ability to provide adequate shelter, healthy food, and other basic necessities for their families. In this way, lessening a multitude of risk factors would result in a significant reduction in overall cancer risk to many Manitobans.

Additionally, we advocate for strategies to directly increase healthy food consumption and physical activity while reducing smoking and alcohol use. Strategies include expanding public awareness campaigns and health education in our schools, providing credits/rebates on healthy foods (e.g. vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains) and physical activity fees and equipment while increasing taxes on tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy foods (e.g. sugary, salty and fast foods). Subsidies would be provided for particularly vulnerable communities, especially those in Winnipeg's inner city and northern Manitoba and incentives for the production of greenhouse vegetables in those areas. Incentives should be provided for producing and consuming organic foods, minimizing the use of potentially carcinogenic pesticides.

We support increasing funding for smoking cessation programs and support services and for a major expansion of public recreation infrastructure including parks, trails, swimming pools, and other recreational facilities. We would prioritize these initiatives based on highest anticipated reductions in cancer and other chronic disease and fund evaluation programs to monitor the effectiveness of these initiatives. Finally, we would encourage all of our elected officials and government employees to lead by example and model healthy behaviors for Manitobans to follow. Manitoba, instead of being one of the least healthy provinces, could and should become one of the healthiest provinces in the country and indeed in the world!