Manitoba's NDP Government Broke a Strike So a Private Lab Company Wouldn't Have To Pay Workers

Hundreds of lab technologists and technicians walked off the job at Dynacare in Winnipeg on 9 September, after wage talks with the company collapsed. Within hours, Manitoba's NDP government — a party that likes to be photographed at picket lines when the cameras are rolling — went to the labour board and got the strike halted as an "essential service." Premier Wab Kinew then went on the radio to call Dynacare's behaviour a mess, said the company "sucks," and mused about maybe someday possibly taking the whole thing public. The workers went back to the bench the same week, with no raise, no contract, and a premier's sympathy substituting for a paycheque.

This is the oldest trick in social-democratic governance: perform solidarity with the workers while doing the employer's dirty work. Dynacare is a private, U.S.-owned monopoly that has run Manitoba's community lab testing since buying out Unicity Labs in 2017 — under a Progressive Conservative government, yes, but re-signed and extended for five more years by the NDP itself in 2025. The union representing the workers, MAHCP, points out that Dynacare agreed in March that its own service was not essential. The company only discovered the word "essential" once its workers found leverage. And the government that insists it's on the workers' side is the one that ran to the board to strip that leverage away, on Dynacare's behalf, using a fig leaf about cancer screenings and HIV tests that the government itself could have guaranteed through direct public provision at any point in the last five years.

The premier's excuse — that re-nationalizing a privatized health service is "exceedingly expensive" — is the same excuse every government gives for never doing it. Privatization is a one-way ratchet: cheap to sell off, deliberately engineered to be costly to reverse, and every year of inaction adds to the bill used to justify further inaction. Meanwhile the arrangement functions exactly as designed: a private firm captures a guaranteed revenue stream from public health budgets, avoids the expensive emergency work that stays in hospitals, and pockets the difference between what it's paid and what it pays workers. When workers organize to close that gap, the state intervenes to protect the flow of public money into private hands — then distances itself rhetorically from the company it just rescued.

None of this is unique to Manitoba, and that's the point. Alberta clawed its lab services back into public hands in 2023 only after a private operator's failures became an audit scandal too large to hide. Ontario and British Columbia still run heavily privatized lab systems. Essential-services designations, ostensibly protective, are one of the most reliable strikebreaking tools available to any government that wants deniability — used against health workers, transit workers, and now lab technicians whose employer had, in writing, admitted they weren't essential until a raise was on the table.

Workers don't need a premier who says the right things on the radio. They need contracts, wages, and a public system that isn't leased out to whoever bids lowest on care. An NDP government calling a company "a mess" while using state power to break its own workers' strike isn't an ally stumbling — it's the machinery of privatization functioning as intended, with a friendlier voiceover.

Sources

'Dynacare sucks,' Manitoba premier says after labour board agrees to halt strike — CBC News
Manitoba Labour Board orders striking Dynacare lab employees back to work — CBC News
Dynacare lab workers on strike in Manitoba after contract talks hit impasse — CBC News
Alberta's takeover of a lab services provider, 2023 — CBC News