According to a newly released report by the Conference Board of Canada Manitoba’s health care system ranks dead last among Canada’s provinces despite being the fourth highest spender.

In the Healthy Provinces, Healthy Canadians: A Provincial Benchmarking Report, Manitoba ranks 10th in terms of overall health performance.”This report is to be used as a learning tool,” said Glen Roberts, the director of health programming at the Conference Board of Canada. “Not to point fingers.”

The report examined 119 areas such as life expectancy, incidence for disease, prevalence of diabetes, depression, chlamydia and AIDS, plus health-care outcomes such as mortality rates, wait times and difficulty obtaining health services.

I don’t think the findings of this report will surprise Manitobans, particularly in the area of wait times. Although these problems are not exclusive to Manitoba they do seem to be widespread. Not surprisingly Manitoba’s NDP government chose to bury it’s head in the ground rather than take the report seriously.

Health Minister Tim Sale disputes the report’s validity.”I don’t accept that our health system performs badly,” said Sale, adding he discredits self-reported data on wait times used in the report because people’s recollections during phone surveys are not always accurate. “The rest of the report was not a surprise, it’s all old data.”

Mr. Sale disputes the validity of the report because he thinks the recollections of those surveyed are not always accurate? Good grief. If this is representative of the government’s view on telephone surveys then why do they hire data gathering firms to engage in it themselves? Why hire polling firms if you don’t trust the memories of those you are polling? I suspect it’s not the act that bothers Mr. Sale but the result. These reports are worth their weight in gold if they are commissioned by governments and they present the desired result. But god forbid if they are commissioned by a third party and render a less than favourable result.

Rather than dismiss this report with some flimsy excuse the Manitoba government may actually want to take a closer look at it.