Steinbach MLA Kelvin Goertzen says the Progressive Conservative Government will make some major moves in the coming months to improve the province's money situation. A new sitting of the Manitoba Legislature got underway Wednesday. The Health Minister says he and his colleagues have spent their first ten months in office getting a handle on the financial picture and they are now ready to take action to deal with spiraling debt.

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Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen"Those challenges have been immense over the last year for me. I think they will culminate in the budget that will come forward in this session. These are difficult decisions, obviously, when you're trying to turn the ship that over the last five years, under the NDP, has moved to increasing deficits. That has been a significant challenge. But you'll see in this session the effort that we're making to ensure that, over time, that deficit is reduced and people can have confidence that we're moving to fix those finances."

Some critics say that any cuts in government spending will cause a reduction in frontline services such as health and education, contrary to what the Conservatives promised during the election campaign. Goertzen disagrees.

"I think the greatest threat to frontline services is an increasing debt because every dollar that goes to paying for the debt isn't a dollar that can go into health care or can go into education or go into social services. So, every year that you increase your debt, you're putting those frontline services at risk down the road. The very critics who say that front line services are at risk are the very people who are putting them at risk by increasing the debt over the last number of years."

Goertzen says he has taken a detailed look at the Health Department budget, which accounts for about half of the government's spending every year. He adds he is trying to be innovative in bringing costs down and gives an example.

"Within health care there are more than 150 bargaining units. That can impact care sometimes, where you have individuals who are doing essentially the same job but are represented by a different bargaining unit, so they're not able to do the same type of work even though they really are the same type of employee. We've had some discussions with our union representatives, asking them to help us reduce the number of bargaining units. I will go forward with that in a way that we think will better the system in the long run but improve patient care in the short run."

The government has not yet indicated when the budget will come down where these measures will be announced.