Via our social media channels, we recently marked the third anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak, which was declared on March 11, 2020.
While life has slowly returned to normal for some, we know that the aftershocks of the pandemic are still being felt throughout our public healthcare system.
One of our members put it best when telling us that they’re not sure they have really recovered from the intensity of this experience, seeing the aftermath in their ICU, the fatigue on the faces of their colleagues, adding “Honestly, I’ll be happy when we are a decade out, when we are back to fully staffed, and we can look back at these days as distant memories.”
To everyone who fought the pandemic, to all those still holding up the frontline, we see you and we thank you.
It’s precisely these years of the pandemic and the dire state of our health system, including the staffing crisis, that informed our latest campaign, The State of Healthcare is OutRAGEous; Vote Like Your Life Depends on It, which was announced in the February 8 edition of The Pulse.
It has been gratifying to see our campaign gain traction with the media and the public, including a prominent spot in the Saturday, March 11, edition of the Winnipeg Free Press. Here is the link.
We believe that health care should be – must be – the No. 1 issue in the provincial election. For those who might be wondering, no, we won’t be telling the public who to vote for. What we are doing is encouraging the public and our members to question candidates when they come to the door and ask ‘what are you going to do to save health care?’
In addition to the billboards and digital ads, we are also printing 2,000 posters and an equal number of postcards, as well as more than 20,000 lawn signs. Once our MNU staff have put the finishing touches on the plan to distribute the items, we will communicate them to our members and Locals/Worksites.
Speaking of Locals/Worksites, there are a few regional AGMs left to go in this year’s cycle and I’d like to thank once again everyone involved in these meetings, from the executives to the rank-and-file members who have been attending them!
There are a few aspects, I’ve noticed, that make for successful AGMs, they are: having a thorough agenda, knowing the basics of Robert’s Rules of Order, choosing a meeting place that enables discussion, and sharing information on your executive and where to find specific collective agreements.
On a final note, I’d like to offer my congratulations to CFNU President Linda Silas, who was nominated last week for the 10th time unchallenged, this is an incredible achievement!
Linda was an ICU and emergency room nurse and led the New Brunswick Nurses Union before being elected president of the CFNU in 2003. She ran for the CFNU presidency on a platform of bringing the issues of working nurses to national political leaders and senior public service officials, and she certainly has accomplished this, as political leaders in Ottawa and across the country know her well!
In solidarity,
Darlene Jackson
President
Manitoba Nurses Union