Prime Minister Mark Carney announced his new cabinet members on Tuesday, including Health Minister Marjorie Michel, who in 2021 was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff to then Prime Minister Justin Trudeu and went on to win his seat in the Montréal constituency of Papineau to replace him.

“The CMA is eager to collaborate with Minister Michel whose years of political experience will be beneficial as we all work to improve access to care for Canadians,” the Canadian Medical Association said in a statement, and Doctors Manitoba joins them in their congratulations.

At a town hall this week, CMA CEO Alex Munter and President Dr. Joss Reimer outlined their plans for the first 100 days of the newly assembled government, promising to not back down on health care priorities. ​“We have already started reaching out to both new and returning MPs, reminding them of the commitments they made and talking about what needs to happen next,” Dr. Reimer said. In the upcoming months, CMA will prioritize educating the new government on improving health care in Canada.

Here’s a recap of the highlights and what we are closely monitoring for physicians in Manitoba:

• Indigenous Health Care: The CMA will be calling on the government to see through legislation to improve Indigenous health care, such as a Clean Water Act, and a bill on data interoperability, both of which were introduced prior to the election.

• Health Care as a Capital Investment, Not an Operating Cost: In order to appeal to the Prime Minister’s business-minded leadership and the fact that he is coming in as a ​“crisis Prime Minister,” the CMA plans to gain traction by positioning their health care advocacy as a capital investment that has strong ROI, as opposed to an operating cost. Carney has talked about making this distinction between capital spending, which will increase in critical areas that he thinks need it, versus operating expenditures. Guest speaker and political consultant Scott Reid said, ​“I would really emphasize that this is a prime minister who I think believes he was brought to office by crisis conditions. He’s going to move to seize that crisis.”

• AI: Prime Minister Mark Carney is known to be a major booster of AI innovation, and Reid suspects this will be a focus of his administration as it relates to health care. ​“And I think healthcare is one of the four or five sectors where he would probably personally say, this is where some of its potential can be unleashed.”

• Medical Schools: CMA CEO Alex Munter noted that we have not built enough medical schools in Canada to service a doubling of the population.

  • “One of the challenges that we have right now, having the shortage of 23,000 family physicians across the country comes from the fact that in the 1990s, we cut medical school admission sizes,” Dr. Reimer added. ​“And so that was at the time done as an economic plan that if we reduce the number of physicians, that would reduce the cost of the system. But what we’re seeing is that that’s not how that played out. Instead, it just increased costs because people’s needs became more acute and more complicated.”