Letters, Oct. 17

Province must also retain docs

Re: Ottawa offers $6M to hire 90 new doctors (Oct. 15)

The federal government’s $6 million commitment to help Manitoba recruit up to 90 additional family doctors by 2028–29 is welcome news, but it should not be mistaken for a solution to the province’s persistent physician shortage.

The question is not simply how many doctors Manitoba can recruit, but how many it can retain —and whether patients will actually have better access to care as a result.

Expanding the practice-ready assessment program for internationally trained physicians is a sensible step. These doctors bring valuable skills and experience, and a more efficient licensing pathway can help address staffing shortages, particularly in rural, northern and Indigenous communities. However, recruitment alone cannot compensate for a health-care system that struggles to retain the physicians it already has.

The reported loss of 8.3 doctors per 1,000 residents through interprovincial migration in 2025, along with survey findings that 22 per cent of practising physicians planned to retire or relocate within three years, should serve as a serious warning.

If Manitoba continues to lose doctors to other provinces because of burnout, excessive administrative workloads, professional isolation and inadequate support, how much of the new investment will translate into lasting improvements?

The difficulties faced by communities such as Carberry, where hospital emergency department services remain severely limited, illustrate the difference between announcing recruitment initiatives and delivering reliable health care. A community does not benefit simply because a doctor has been recruited if staffing gaps, inadequate team support or other operational challenges continue to restrict services.

Manitoba must also address the conditions that drive physicians away. Competitive compensation, team-based care, reduced administrative burdens, adequate staffing, professional development and meaningful support for doctors working in rural and remote areas are essential.

The $6 million commitment may be a good start, as municipal leaders have suggested. But Manitobans should judge success by outcomes, not announcements. Until the province can demonstrate that it is retaining doctors, strengthening rural health services and providing timely access to family physicians, another recruitment initiative risks treating the symptoms rather than the causes of the crisis.

Yog Rahi Gupta

Winnipeg

A World Food Day open letter

One thousand, five hundred thirty-eight days.

That’s how long the world has before the deadline for achieving “Zero Hunger” – Goal 2 of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, created by world leaders who desired to make the world a better place.

We promised to end it by 2030. And we’ve made progress.

For the past three years, the rate of global hunger has declined modestly, proving that investments in food security, nutrition and resilient livelihoods can make a difference. Thousands of families have restored their food security and experienced how it feels to not worry about where their next meal is going to come from. In 2025-26 alone, Canadian Foodgrains Bank members reached over 1.1 million people with emergency food assistance and long-term agricultural support that will transform their futures. There are good things happening, and progress is being made.

But if 520 million people are still going to be left behind by 2030, then progress alone is not enough.

On World Food Day — Friday, Oct. 16 — Foodgrains Bank (urged) the international community to renew its commitment to ending hunger. Now is not the time for wealthy nations to pull funding from international development. It is the time to pick up the pace and commit to an accelerated approach that will get us to the end of 2030 in a significantly different position than we are now.

Because the promise we made in 2016 still matters, 10 years on. It matters for Amna, a mother living through the midst of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan, and it matters for Alphenès, a father in Haiti desperately seeking treatment and care for his baby as the child recovers from severe acute malnutrition.

It matters for all of us.

A world with zero hunger will positively impact our economies, health, education, equality, and social development. It is a key piece of building a better future, and to achieving other SDGs — because persistent hunger is one of the most limiting factors to our development as people and as a society.

We need only look to Brazil to remind ourselves that when local food security efforts are backed by sufficient funding, entire countries can transform their food security.

By relaunching its comprehensive Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) and Brazil Without Hunger (Brasil Sem Fome) governance frameworks, Brazil lifted over 40 million people out of moderate to severe food insecurity between 2022 and 2024, officially removing the country from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hunger map in July 2025.

It is one of the fastest recorded improvements in the world — driven by political decisions that prioritized farmers and food access in hunger policies.

But there’s another lesson Brazil has for us. In 2014, Brazil achieved an exit from the FAO hunger map before facing a major downturn years later when anti-hunger councils were dismantled, budgets were cut, and the economic pressures of the pandemic hit. The very solutions that had pulled Brazil out of its hunger crisis had been abandoned, and hunger was back on the rise.

As today’s global aid cuts repeat the same mistake, it begs the question: if these reductions are not improving lives in recipient countries and are offering little benefit to people at home, what exactly is being gained?

In a world that produces enough food to feed everyone, hunger is not inevitable. It is a choice we make every time we abandon the solutions that have created the progress we see today.

Because when we get to 2030, whether we ended global hunger won’t just be counted on a goals-tracking sheet or measured against missed targets. It will be counted in lives, and that is the measure that matters most.

Andy Harrington

Executive director, Canadian Foodgrains Bank

Winnipeg

Come together

Re: Liberal MLA’s autism strategy bill gains all-party backing (Oct. 15)

Politics is often defined by antagonism between rival political parties.

This week, for a nice change, the Manitoba legislature came together to unanimously support Liberal MLA Cindy Lamoureux’s Bill 232, the Autism Strategy Act. The bill seeks to improve services for people with autism and includes important tracking and accountability measures.

With one in 50 Canadian children and youth diagnosed with autism, there is a great need for this legislation. I commend Ms. Lamoureux for introducing the bill and all parties for prioritizing the public good over partisanship.

Sean Petty

Winnipeg

Candidates mum on taxes

We have heard many sundry election promises, but nary a hint of the growing deficits our fair city faces.

This should have been the No. 1 priority of this campaign, but all would-be or want-to-be mayors are ignoring the elephant in the room.

With only two main sources of revenue, increases in provincial municipal funding or raising home and business property taxes are their only options.

It’s about time all candidates tell us how they plan to deal with problem — instead they only offer fairy dust.

John Thomas Tierney

Winnipeg