Oswald promises bump in midwife access if made NDP leader

If Theresa Oswald becomes the next leader of Manitoba's NDP, she says she'll find the money to hire 20 more midwives to make life better for expectant mothers.

• Midwife shortage 'like a punch in the gut' for expectant mom
• Midwife shortage limits Winnipeg birth centre deliveries

In fact, she figures she can score the first dozen or so almost immediately.

But critics say if it's really that easy, why didn't she do so during her seven-year reign as health minister?

"Oh, [she] didn't do bupkis. It drives me crazy," said mother-of-four and midwife proponent Rachelle Ladd. "It was harder for me to find a midwife last summer than it was 12 years ago."

Right now, there are 53 midwives licenced to practice in our province. That's about 20 more than when Oswald first became health minister in 2006.

But even Oswald admits there are still "hundreds" of expectant mothers who want access to a midwife and can't find one.

As a result, the state-of-the-art birthing centre Oswald helped launch in 2011 is still turning away the vast majority of women who want their services.

"I think we've come a huge distance on midwifery, but I also know that we have a ways to go -- knowing that we have hundreds of women that still can't access that service," Oswald said. "And that's precisely why I don't want to relent on this."

Oswald is currently running to become Manitoba's NDP leader — and possibly the province’s next premier.

She made the midwifery promise as part of her campaign platform, but it's a promise critics say she couldn't fulfill when she was the health minister.

In 2010, Oswald promised Winnipeg's $3.2 million birthing centre would be capable of assisting in 500 deliveries a year, but when it opened up a year later, more than 75 per cent of women who wanted access to it had to be turned away.

As recently as 2013, it was still running at just nine per cent of its capacity. To date, it's provided fewer than 400 deliveries in total — compared to the original mandate of 500 per year.

Elsewhere in the province, Oswald vowed expectant mothers would have better access to a midwife once the University College of the North graduated their first class of recruits.  But by 2012, their midwifery program suddenly collapsed amidst allegations of mismanagement. In the end, the $8 million investment graduated just one class of eight students.

Still, Oswald said these "bumps" in the road just confirm her commitment to prenatal health care.

"You've heard me working on this for a number of years, and I think you proved my point," Oswald said, in response to her track record. "I certainly have been working on this for a number of years, and should I have the great privilege to become leader, I want to continue to bring prominence to this, as we make budgetary decisions."

That's why she says she'll be able to accomplish what she couldn't pull off as health minister. The 20 new midwives will be hired with money she'll find in the health-care budget, even if that means she doesn't adhere to the current Premier's promise to pull off a balanced budget by 2016.

"It's not that I don't care about balancing the budget, I do care about that, very much," she said. "But indeed amending that arbitrary target -- so that we're able to do things that Manitobans want right now — I think Manitoba women and babies deserve no less."