This week, Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Brian Pallister announced long-expected changes to the province’s education system, unveiling plans to cut $40 million in administration costs by eliminating all but one of Manitoba’s elected school boards, merging school divisions and setting up a centralized provincewide education authority stacked with government appointees.

The Pallister government expects Manitoba’s workers to pull themselves up by the bootstraps while it actively steals their boots from under them. The labour movement has been losing its war with employers and the state since the radical wings of Canadian unionism dissolved. Reformism lacks the leverage needed to earn a seat at the negotiating table. A better world is possible, but it is achievable only through direct action from below.

As many predicted, spending cuts produced unintended costs. Little did we know it would be the lives of so many Manitobans. As John Maynard Keynes once said: “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” Pallister was precisely wrong, and his frugal approach to politics and spending is exactly why Manitobans are dying. The blood is on his hands.

Manitoba is already receiving a glimpse of the austerity that many Canadians will likely have to face in the coming months. The Pallister government has shown itself to be incapable of moving beyond deficit reduction-obsessed politics and implementing a new economic model that prioritises mass prosperity over cutting and privatizing public services under the guise of the pandemic.

Labour shortages, daycare rates rising faster than inflation, and the increasing scarcity of spaces for children, plague most provinces. These issues are compounded by a lack of proper funding from provincial and federal governments, and the rapid expansion of the private sector. The crisis facing Canadian parents and daycare workers is now a serious concern.