“Working together, we can achieve that goal by supporting the students here in Neepawa that are starting their journey towards fulfilling careers as future nursing professionals,” said Premier Wab Kinew in a news release on Jan. 22.

The Neepawa Training Centre will partner with Assiniboine Community College (ACC) to run a two-year, licensed practical nurse program. Licensed practical nurses (LPNs) provide health care, usually under the direction of medical practitioners like registered nurses (RNs), according to a job description on the Government of Canada’s website.

In February of 2023, the previous Progressive Conservative government announced it was giving ACC $2.1 million in operating and capital funding to offer a one-time LPN course. In March of that year, ACC said in a news release it would prioritize applications from people living within 100 kilometres of Neepawa or within the Prairie Mountain Health region.

That program could accept up to 25 students. Twenty students began studies at the centre in January, the Winnipeg Free Press reported.

A new hospital is also in the works for the community. In an Oct. 17, 2022 news release, the province announced it would build the facility with an expanded emergency department, 63 acute care inpatient beds, up from 38 at the current site, and increased space for other programs like surgery and palliative care.

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“I feel overwhelmed, he said. “And, you know, a lot of times when you get announcements like this, there’s somewhat of a lead-up. We were kind of caught by surprise.”

The funds were announced by Premier Wab Kinew during his address at Manitoba Ag Days, the country’s largest indoor farm show, taking place in Brandon Jan. 16-18.

The money comes from both the provincial and federal governments through the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership, Canada’s current five-year ag funding agreement between provinces and the Government of Canada.

“Success in the ag industry is really about the success of the people,” Kinew told Ag Days attendees. “We’re going to keep investing in services like mental health that we’re announcing here today. And it’s our firm belief that when the government is willing to put in the work on our side to support you, you are going to continue to be the backbone of our provincial economy for generations to come.”

The Manitoba Farmer Wellness Program is a non-profit organization that launched in 2021. The program offers farmers up to six free counselling sessions with mental health professionals familiar with the agricultural sector.

Friesen got word that the announcement was coming at the end of last week. The organization is still working out what improvements they can make with the additional funding.

“There’s so many things we can do,” he said. “We’re going to have a board meeting in the very near future, and we’re going to look at this. We’re incredibly happy about it.”

For more on this story, pick up the Jan. 25 edition of the Manitoba Co-operator.

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In an ambitious throne speech delivered Wednesday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party committed itself to implementing universal child care and extending or enhancing many of the economic measures put in place to curb the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But it’s a commitment to enhancing rural broadband that farmers will likely find most intriguing.

“In the last six months, many more people have worked from home, done classes from the kitchen table, shopped online, and accessed government services remotely. So it has become more important than ever that all Canadians have access to the internet,” read the throne speech, delivered by Gov. Gen. Julie Payette.

“The government will accelerate the connectivity timelines and ambitions of the Universal Broadband Fund to ensure that all Canadians, no matter where they live, have access to high-speed internet.”

The Universal Broadband Fund was launched in 2019 and, according to the government, is meant to “support projects to build or upgrade access and transport infrastructure to provide fixed and mobile wireless broadband Internet access services in eligible underserved areas of Canada.”

Efforts to expand access to health care were also highlighted in the speech.

“The Government will ensure that everyone – including in rural and remote areas – has access to a family doctor or primary care team. COVID-19 has also shown that our system needs to be more flexible and able to reach people at home. The government will continue to expand capacity to deliver virtual health care,” read the text of the speech.

Canada’s government also plans to legislate the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050 as part of its effort to combat climate change.

The speech specifically mentioned the need for the “know-how of the energy sector” to be involved in such an effort.

Two key priorities were listed: supporting existing manufacturing and natural resource sectors “transform to meet a net zero future, creating good-paying and long-lasting jobs” as well as “recognize farmers, foresters, and ranchers as key partners in the fight against climate change, supporting their efforts to reduce emissions and build resilience.”

Trudeau’s government also plans to create a new way of managing Canadian waters. Citing the closure of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), the speech commits the federal government to create a “Canada Water Agency to keep our water safe, clean and well-managed.”

“The government will also need to identify opportunities to build more resilient water and irrigation infrastructure,” Payette said.

The speech said Canada will also continue to fight for free trade and reform at the World Trade Organization.

“COVID-19 has accelerated the existing trends toward a more fragmented global order. It remains in Canada’s interest to create and maintain bilateral and multilateral relationships to advance peace and economic prosperity.”

Details of the legislative plans highlighted in the speech are expected to emerge in the coming days and weeks.

— D.C. Fraser reports for Glacier FarmMedia from Ottawa.

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The federal government said Tuesday it will, effective “immediately,” temporarily waive its rule requiring a TFW to receive federal approval for a new work permit before he or she starts at a different new job.

Up against “new challenges in a rapidly changing job market” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many TFWs with employer-specific work permits lost their jobs this spring, the government said in a release.

Of those, some have already left Canada; others can’t yet leave due to international travel restrictions or unavailability of flights. But under the normal process for a TFW to switch to another eligible job, he or she must first apply for a new work permit, then wait for that permit to be approved and issued before he or she can begin work.

The new temporary policy allows a TFW who is already in Canada and has secured a new job offer — “typically backed by a labour market test” — to get approval to start working in the new job, even while the work permit application is being fully processed.

The temporary policy will shorten a process that “can often take 10 weeks or more, down to 10 days or less,” the government said.

The decision comes as “many employers in sectors that have ongoing labour needs and who provide critical goods and services to Canadians, such as agriculture, agri-food and health care, find themselves with urgent needs for additional employees,” the government said.

“Today’s announcement builds on all the work we have been doing since the moment COVID struck to ensure our agriculture sector, particularly our horticultural producers, can count on their workforce and that they can ensure their safety,” federal Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said Tuesday in a separate statement.

To be eligible for the shortened process, a TFW must be in Canada with valid status and an employer-specific work permit — or must have been working under a work permit exemption — and must have submitted an application for a new work permit with a valid job offer, under either the TFW program or the International Mobility Program.

The work permit applicant must then submit a request to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). The request will be reviewed “within 10 days,” the government said, and if approved, authorization for the worker to start at the new job will go to the applicant via email.

An employer eligible for the new process still must have or get a valid positive labour market impact assessment (LMIA) from Employment and Social Development Canada, name the worker in a position on the LMIA, and notify Service Canada.

In an “employer-specific, LMIA-exempt” situation, an employer must submit an offer of employment through the International Mobility Program employer portal.

“While there will always be jobs for Canadians who choose to work in these sectors, these changes help support our economy by ensuring that temporary foreign workers already here can contribute during these extraordinary times,” federal Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough said in the government’s release. — Glacier FarmMedia Network

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A university release said this substance is widespread in vertebrates and therefore in many farm animals, but missing in the human organism.

It said an environment that is not highly hygienic has a positive effect on the development of the immune system, as it learns not to react to harmless materials, as is the case with allergies.

Microbes that occur in higher amounts and greater diversity on farms protect farm children from allergies and asthma.

The release said about 30 per cent of children have allergies, with the exception of farm children among whom the disease is increasing less dramatically than in the case of their friends who live in the same village, but not on a farm.

“Early childhood contact with animals and the consumption of food of animal origin seem to regulate the inflammatory reactions of the immune system,” Remo Frei of the Swiss Institute of Allergy and Asthma Research said in the release.

A study of more than 1,000 children tested for the presence of the Neu5Gc antibody related to asthma occurrence in European children. “Farm children have many more antibodies against Neu5Gc in their blood — and children with more antibodies suffered considerably less from asthma,” Frei said.

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According to Bob Conibear, chair of the Baldur Health Care Committee, the community lost its single physician last year to health problems. The void was then filled by a part-time nurse practitioner and a decision will be made in May whether the position becomes full time.

“It’s a big impact,” Conibear said. “You have a nurse practitioner, which is great to have, but there’s a lot of things that they can’t provide.”

According to provincial guidelines, a nurse practitioner can prescribe most medications, order and interpret most diagnostic tests, provide vaccinations and perform minor procedures such as stitches.

The Baldur Health Centre has no emergency room, but contains a clinic, pharmacy, personal care home and transitional unit for patients awaiting transport to a bigger hospital. With only one nurse practitioner available, the facility has become reliant on teleconferenced-in specialists and is not open consistently, Conibear says, and the result leaves residents travelling to Brandon or Boundary Trails Health Centre near Morden, both over an hour away.

“Killarney is an option too, but it’s so loaded up with things, you can’t get in there, so basically you’re heading to Brandon or Boundary Trails,” Conibear said.

Familiar tale

Baldur’s story is not unique and it is one repeating across rural Manitoba, where small-town hospitals have fought for years to both draw physicians and keep them once they arrive.

About 28 per cent of Manitoba’s population is rural — ranked in the middle of other provinces, although 10 per cent higher than the national average — and 63 of the province’s 73 hospitals lie in a rural area, according to the Provincial Clinical and Preventive Services Planning for Manitoba report.

The report, released in February as part of health-care cost reduction efforts, also found that Manitoba falls below the national average on both regular access and regular contact with a doctor.

“The biggest thing is, when people are recruiting to small towns, nobody wants to be the only doctor there. So if there’s one or two doctors there, people don’t want to relocate to a community like that,” Killarney-Turtle Mountain Mayor Rick Pauls said.

The RM of Killarney-Turtle Mountain is one of several areas in southwest Manitoba to make headlines after taking active measures to recruit or retain staff.

Last year, the municipality spent $250,000 in taxpayer funds to bring in two international doctors, one from Ireland and one from England. Both are employees of the regional health authority (RHA), leaving the municipality with a bill of $250,000 to cover recruiting fees, resettlement costs and legal fees.

“The RHA recruits for the region,” Pauls said. “So when it’s looking for the region, it’s looking for a lot of these larger centres — Brandon, Dauphin — as well. It will get a doctor for the region; place them where the need is, but it’s not necessarily the best fit for the doctors themselves. So when we get these international medical grads, what a lot of times we see happen is they won’t stay for longer than four years. As soon as their return-of-service agreement is done, they leave.

“What we did is we took the approach to specifically recruit for our community, so these doctors knew that they were going to be practising in Killarney; this is the hospital they’re going to be looking at; this is where they could possibly live; this is all the amenities that they have in our town and we sold them on the town rather than coming here to be a physician. We think because of that they’re going to be here long term.”

About 3,500 people live in Killarney, with about 12,000 in the surrounding area potentially reliant on the hospital, Pauls said.

The two doctors arrived over the last six months and bring the health centre’s staff to five.

“It’ll definitely ease up on some of the times for a regular checkup, but we’ve never lost any services because of (staffing lack,)” Pauls said.

Recruitment is the latest, but not first, effort to draw physicians to Killarney-Turtle Mountain. About five years ago, the council purchased a condo to house temporary physicians, a model that has since spread to Glenboro, 70 kilometres to the north.

A two-bedroom apartment was rented in March to house storm-stayed staff and the temporary doctors, or locums, the community of 650 has become increasingly reliant on.

Tracy Rimmer of the Glenboro Health Action Committee says 1,800 to 2,000 area residents rely on the local health centre, but staffing has declined from three physicians to one, who is near retirement age, plus a nurse practitioner about to go on maternity leave. The decision to take a more proactive approach already appears to be helping though.

“We have already noticed that medical professionals are more willing to come here rather than go to, say, Carberry and have our situations taken up there by ambulance,” she said.

The committee has raised funds to rent the apartment for a year, although Rimmer has said the group intends to maintain the space long term.

Prior to March, locums were lodged with residents, a situation Rimmer says discouraged temporary doctors from working in Glenboro. She added that there have been instances where no doctor was available.

The Glenboro facility is equipped for acute care and includes a clinic and personal care home.

Like Killarney, the committee hopes to actively recruit a physician to the area and has been in contact with both the Killarney-Turtle Mountain council and Prairie Mountain Health.

“This is not a situation where we are telling the province that the health region is not doing its job,” Rimmer said. “This is a situation where we feel that communities have to step up and do their part. The health region is doing the best it can, but this is not a unique story. This is just one community saying, ‘We’re going to better our odds if we possibly can.’ All of the lobbying and all of the criticizing of the health-care administration, it doesn’t help. Just get out there and do this for yourself. If your community needs a doctor, then find one.”

Prairie Mountain Health CEO Penny Gilson said that “many” communities besides Glenboro and Killarney have taken an active role in recruiting and retaining health-care professionals.

“Prairie Mountain Health (PMH) works in partnership with the communities – sometimes a joint effort yields success with PMH focusing on the practice environment side of things and the community on what the community specifically has to offer as people need to make a choice to ‘live and work’ in the communities,” she said.

In March, Prairie Mountain Health was handed a $17.5-million “savings target” by the province and was told to cut 15 per cent of management positions. The health authority has not commented in detail on its financial standing, saying only that talks with the province continue.

“PMH would obviously prefer that all health-care vacancies, not just for physicians but all health-care workers, were filled but that is not the reality so the region continues to try and ensure as much service access as possible with the resources available while continuing ongoing recruitment efforts,” Gilson said.

Jason Falk, chair of the Carberry Health Action Committee, says it is “hit and miss” to maintain the three doctors and one nurse practitioner needed to keep the Carberry Health Centre at full capacity. The facility currently co-ordinates with Glenboro so that one of the two locations will have emergency care at all times, Falk said.

The Carberry Health Centre currently employs two physicians and one nurse practitioner and has worked, “with very limited success” with the RHA on recruitment, Falk said.

Unlike its neighbours to the south, however, the committee has turned recruitment efforts inward.

“Going forward, it’s what we can do at a grassroots level as far as educating our own students, our high school students, informing them of the possibilities in health care and what’s involved in returning to rural practice and the advantages of it,” Falk said.

A contingent from the committee will travel to Winnipeg later this year for University of Manitoba career fairs, also in the hope of health professionals.

Community futures

For Rimmer, the fight to recruit and retain doctors has deeper implications than a slightly longer drive for her next checkup. She has argued that urbanization and the aging farm population (Statistics Canada estimated that the average age of farmers had grown to 54 years by 2011), may affect the viability of small towns into the future.

“Health care is one aspect of the sustainability of our rural communities and it’s a slippery slope,” she said. “Every little bit that we slide down that slope, whether we lose our emergency rooms, whether we lose our acute care, and basically all of these rural hospitals turn into personal care homes, that takes things away from our community that sell our community (and keep) people here, and (bring) new people in.”

According to 2016 census data, the Municipality of Glenboro-South Cypress had modest population growth from 2011 to 2016, although more detailed data on age is expected in May.

According to the Provincial Clinical and Preventive Services Planning for Manitoba report, 18.5 per cent of the population in Prairie Mountain Health was over 65 years, well over the 15.1 per cent provincial average.

Bob Conibear shared Rimmer’s concern, particularly in view of provincial discussion of health-care reforms, although his response was more moderate.

“You have to have your basic services,” he said. “I mean, we know we can’t have everything, but you certainly have to have your clinics and then you can advance out from there. That’s our big concern is to keep the small places open.”

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That frank assessment came from provincial Minister of Health, Seniors and Active Living, Kelvin Goertzen, at the annual convention of the Association of Manitoba Municipalities last week in Winnipeg.

“The need is probably two or three times that in eight to 10 years,” said Goertzen, speaking at the event’s ministerial forum Wednesday.

Meeting that demand won’t be sustainable at current levels of costs and different models for providing personal care must be found, he said.

“We will have to look at different and creative ways when it comes to personal care homes. Personal care might not take place in personal care homes,” he said.

“There will have to be different ways of looking at care beyond personal care homes.”

The minister was responding to questions from delegates about when their communities might finally see much-needed facilities built in their region. Said one delegate from Lac du Bonnet, “there is desperate need” for a facility they’ve been long awaiting there.

The Tories campaigned on the promise they would fast track construction of 1,200 new personal care home beds over eight years. The cost will be $160 million — or about $133,000 per bed.

“That is an impressive target to meet, a challenge to meet,” Goertzen said, adding they are currently reviewing both existing submissions and taking new requests.

Government will be looking for efficiencies to operate these facilities while also needing partnerships and help from municipalities to deliver on this, he said.

Health-care review begins

Last week the Manitoba government announced a Health Care Sustainability and Innovation Review seeking public input through surveys on how to improve the long-term sustainability of Manitoba’s overall health-care system.

“We want input from Manitobans on how health-care spending should be prioritized, what ideas should be pursued and what concerns should be addressed,” Goertzen said in the news release.

“Right now, the costs of the health-care system are not sustainable and we want to hear from Manitobans about what we can do better.

“We are asking Manitobans for their ideas on how we can make the right choices to be more efficient, implement cost-effective new ideas and ensure quality care is available for many years to come.”

The survey feedback will be used to inform the recommendations of the review, the minister said. An initial report is expected by the end of January 2017 with a final report in spring to provide recommendations with implementation plans, timelines and estimates of the projected savings.

To take the survey, visit www.gov.mb.ca./health/haveyoursay.

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