Manitoba's NDP Sent Its Youth Back To The 1990s — And Called It Child Protection
Wab Kinew's government bans teenagers from social media, blows its budget, and blames Donald Trump. One Steinbach family is keeping score.
May 6, 2026 · By Justin Plosz · Steinbach, Manitoba · Community · 12 min read
A Kitchen Table In Steinbach
It is 7:15 on a Tuesday morning in Steinbach, Manitoba, and Karen Thiessen is staring at her hydro bill.
Her husband Dale has already left for the shop — he runs a small heating-and-cooling outfit that has served the southeast Manitoba corridor for nineteen years. Their two teenagers, Brody, 15, and Hailey, 17, are getting ready for school. On the counter, next to an empty coffee pot, is a notice from the province.
Hailey can still check Instagram. Brody — one year younger — legally cannot. Not because of anything he did. Not because any parent in this household asked the government to step in. But because Premier Wab Kinew's NDP decided, sometime between blowing their fourth consecutive budget projection and finding another way to blame Washington for Winnipeg's problems, that what Manitoba's teenagers really needed was a trip back to 1994.
"I asked Brody about it," Karen says, refilling her mug. "He just shrugged. He said, 'Mom, I'll use my friend's phone.' And that's it. That's the policy. That's what we got for three years of NDP government."
The Thiessens are not a political family in any organized sense. Dale voted PC his whole life. Karen split her last two ballots between NDP and PC depending on the candidate. Neither of them marched with a sign. Neither of them called their MLA. But both of them, sitting at that kitchen table, can tell you — in specific, dollar-denominated, wait-time-measured detail — exactly what the Manitoba NDP has cost them since Wab Kinew led his party to victory in October 2023.
The Social Media Ban: Accountability, Or The Absence Of It?
Let us be precise about what Manitoba's social media legislation actually does, because the government's communications team has worked very hard to make it sound like something else.
The law — framed by the Kinew government as protecting children from online harm — requires social media platforms to verify the ages of users and bar those under 16 from creating accounts without explicit parental consent. On the surface, it sits alongside similar laws in Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and, federally, the Online Harms Act framework that Ottawa spent years failing to actually implement. Premier Kinew has positioned it as courageous leadership on digital safety.
The timing, however, is worth noting.
The legislation advanced through the Manitoba Legislature at the precise moment the province's auditor general was preparing a report on NDP spending overruns. At the precise moment hospital emergency departments in Winnipeg were posting four- and five-hour wait times. At the precise moment the Winnipeg Free Press was running its third consecutive story about a provincial budget that had drifted so far from its own projections that the government had quietly stopped publishing quarterly fiscal updates.
"There are a lot of ways governments hide things," says a former Manitoba civil servant who asked not to be named, speaking to PRC from Winnipeg. "One of the oldest is to give the media something loud to talk about. Social media bans for kids is very loud. Nobody wants to be the journalist who says the quiet part loud: that a government in deficit is also banning the teenagers who will grow up to vote them out."
The opposition Manitoba Conservatives were blunt. PC leader Wayne Ewasko told the legislature that while no serious person disputes the harms of unregulated social media on young people, the specific mechanism, timeline, and enforcement architecture of the NDP's legislation was designed to be unworkable — generating headlines without generating solutions. "You cannot enforce a birthdate check with a government that won't even enforce its own budget," Ewasko said during debate.
Brody Thiessen, who is fifteen and therefore caught on the wrong side of the age line, had a simpler read. "It just means I use my friend's phone until I turn sixteen. Nothing changes."
The Budget: What The Numbers Actually Say
In the spring of 2024, the Kinew government tabled its first full budget. The headline figure was a deficit of approximately $2 billion — large for a province of 1.4 million people, and larger than the NDP's own pre-election projections had suggested would be necessary.
The government's explanation was layered. First, they had inherited a mess from the Stefanson-era Progressive Conservatives — a claim the PCs disputed with their own audited numbers. Second, they had made deliberate choices to invest in healthcare, education, and infrastructure, investments they argued the previous government had deferred. Third — and this is where the argument became most politically convenient — Donald Trump's tariff agenda had created headwinds for Manitoba's export-dependent economy that no provincial government could have anticipated.
That last claim deserves scrutiny.
Manitoba's budget deficit was projected before the most aggressive phase of Trump's tariff program took effect. The province's fiscal watchdog — the Manitoba Financial Advisory Council — noted in a publicly available report that the majority of the spending overage traced to domestic decisions: wage settlements in the public sector that exceeded the government's own modelling, capital project overruns on infrastructure the NDP had fast-tracked for announcement purposes, and an expansion of social program eligibility that added beneficiaries faster than revenues could support them.
In other words: the deficit was, in its largest components, self-inflicted.
"Trump is a convenient villain," says a senior economist at a Winnipeg-based policy institute, who asked for anonymity given the politically charged climate. "Manitoba's grain exports did take a hit from trade uncertainty. That's real. But that accounts for, at most, a fraction of the fiscal gap. The rest is a spending problem. And calling it a Trump problem is not analysis — it's a press release."
For Dale Thiessen, the budget story is personal. His heating-and-cooling business operates on thin margins. Labour costs are up — partly due to the province's above-inflation minimum wage increases. Fuel surcharges have risen. And a provincial infrastructure program that was supposed to accelerate road repair contracts in southeast Manitoba has moved slowly enough that Dale is still waiting for a bid opportunity he was told, eighteen months ago, was "coming soon."
"I hear the Premier on the radio talking about all the investments they're making," Dale says. "And I'm sitting here wondering where those investments are. I'm not seeing them. My customers aren't seeing them. But I'm sure as hell seeing the tax bill."
What The NDP Has Done In One Year: A Running Ledger
Beyond the headline deficit and the social media legislation, the Kinew government's first full year of governing produced a specific list of policy actions and outcomes that, taken together, constitute the NDP's actual record — not their narrative about it.
**Healthcare**: The NDP campaigned relentlessly on fixing emergency room wait times in Winnipeg's strained hospital network. In its first year, the government announced a nursing recruitment strategy, a physician retention bonus program, and a new urgent care centre in a north Winnipeg neighbourhood. What it did not deliver was a measurable reduction in ER wait times. The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority's own published data showed median emergency wait times at Grace Hospital and the Health Sciences Centre remained above pre-pandemic levels through the winter of 2025-26. The government's response was to quietly stop publishing the monthly wait time dashboard that had been public under the previous PC government — a move the opposition characterized, accurately, as erasing the scoreboard when you're losing.
**Pharmacare co-payments**: The NDP expanded Manitoba's provincial pharmacare program, reducing co-payment requirements for a significant number of low-income Manitobans. This is a genuine, defensible policy achievement. It is also expensive, and its cost was not fully incorporated into the budget projections that were later overrun.
**Carbon tax friction**: The Kinew government occupies an awkward position on the federal carbon tax — the premier has, at various points, expressed sympathy with premiers who opposed it while simultaneously maintaining Manitoba's participation in the federal system. This rhetorical zigzag has satisfied no one: rural Manitobans who heat with natural gas and drive long distances see the carbon tax as a direct cost on their households; environmental advocates see the NDP's hesitation as a betrayal. The Thiessen family heats their home with natural gas. Their annual fuel bill has gone up.
**Education**: The NDP's school funding formula was revised upward, with per-student funding increases across the province. Teacher unions praised the move. Parents in rural Manitoba — including Steinbach — pointed out that per-student funding increases do not translate into hiring when there are no certified teachers available to hire, a supply problem that no provincial budget line has solved.
**Infrastructure**: The province announced a multi-year roads and bridges program with considerable fanfare. Actual tendered contracts through the first fiscal year came in below projections. Crown corporations managing infrastructure spending reported internal backlogs. The press releases went out on time; the contracts did not.
**Fiscal transparency**: The Kinew government eliminated the quarterly fiscal updates that had been published under the previous PC administration. Critics — including the Canadian Taxpayers Federation's Manitoba director — described this as a deliberate reduction in public accountability. The government said it was streamlining reporting. The result is that Manitobans now have fewer data points to assess whether the budget is on track between annual budget days.
The Federal NDP Factor: Jagmeet Singh's Costly Experiment
The Thiessen family's frustration with Manitoba's provincial NDP does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader national reckoning with the NDP as a governing proposition.
At the federal level, the NDP under Jagmeet Singh spent the last two parliamentary sessions propping up Justin Trudeau's Liberal minority government — a supply-and-confidence arrangement that Singh defended as a pragmatic way to extract policy concessions, and that most Canadians, by the end of it, experienced as a way of keeping in power a government that had exhausted its mandate and its ideas simultaneously.
The deal produced dental care and pharmacare framework legislation. It also produced the longest sustained period of Liberal governance since Jean Chrétien, during which housing costs in every major Canadian city reached generational highs, inflation ran above the Bank of Canada's target band for multiple consecutive years, and the RCMP and intelligence community surfaced ongoing allegations of foreign election interference that neither party moved urgently to address.
Karen Thiessen voted Liberal in 2021. She will not say what she plans to do in the next federal election. But she is specific about what changed her mind: "I just kept watching Jagmeet Singh go on TV and say 'we made them do this' and 'we made them do that,' and none of it felt like it was for people like us. It felt like it was for the party. It felt like politics."
The NDP's federal brand — damaged by its perceived role as a lifeline for an unpopular Liberal government — is a weight Wab Kinew has had to carry provincially. Conservative messaging in Manitoba has been disciplined in connecting the two: Kinew's deficit spending is the same instinct as Trudeau's; Kinew's social media ban is the same instinct as Singh's Online Harms Act; the NDP at every level is a party that spends money it doesn't have and then blames the other side when the bill arrives.
That message is landing in Steinbach.
The Counter-Argument The NDP Will Make
In the interest of honest journalism, this story will give the government its best case.
Wab Kinew inherited a healthcare system that had been chronically underfunded during years of PC-era austerity. The nursing shortage in Manitoba is real, structural, and not fixable in twelve months regardless of how much money is allocated. The social media legislation, whatever its enforcement challenges, addresses a documented harm to adolescent mental health that multiple peer-reviewed studies support. The budget deficit, while larger than projected, reflects a deliberate choice to stop deferring investment in public infrastructure that the PC government had allowed to age. And the Trump tariff impact on Manitoba's agricultural export economy — grain, canola, pork, beef — is not fabricated; it is a genuine external shock that no provincial government could fully offset.
The Kinew government would also note, correctly, that it is less than two years into a four-year mandate. Governments that make structural investments in healthcare and education do not see returns in eighteen months. The pipeline from a nursing bursary program to a bedside nurse is years long. The pipeline from an infrastructure contract to a completed road is longer still. Demanding results on a timeline that no government — Conservative or NDP — could realistically meet is a form of bad faith.
All of that is true. Some of it is even convincing.
But Karen Thiessen's hydro bill is still on the counter. Dale's infrastructure contract still hasn't arrived. Brody still can't log into his account without his friend's phone. And the quarterly fiscal report that would tell them whether any of this is on track stopped being published six months ago.
"I don't need a press release," Karen says. "I need the actual number."
Why This Moment Matters For Canadian Conservatism
The Thiessen family's experience is not unique to Steinbach. Versions of this story are playing out in Portage la Prairie, in Brandon, in Thompson, and in every rural and small-city corner of Manitoba where the NDP's coalition is thinnest and the distance from Winnipeg's policy apparatus is greatest.
Conservative strategists — both federally and in the provincial PC party — have identified the Kinew government's first-year record as a political asset. The combination of a memorable, symbolically overreaching policy (the social media ban), a fiscal record that is genuinely difficult to defend (the blown projections, the disappeared quarterly updates), and a convenient external villain (Trump) that is losing rhetorical potency the longer it gets used, gives the right a coherent narrative: the NDP does not trust you, does not level with you, and will not be held accountable by you.
The risk for conservatives is overreach in the other direction. Attacking the social media ban too aggressively positions them as pro-algorithm, pro-Big Tech, indifferent to adolescent mental health — none of which plays well with the suburban Manitoba voters the PCs need. The smarter attack, which PC leader Ewasko has largely executed, is on process and honesty: the ban may or may not be good policy, but a government that eliminates its own accountability mechanisms to hide a deficit it is blaming on Washington does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on any file.
"Governments reveal themselves in the small decisions," says a veteran Manitoba political consultant, speaking on background. "Pulling the quarterly updates wasn't a big decision. Nobody wrote a big press release about it. But it tells you everything about how this government thinks about accountability. They think it's optional."
That framing — accountability as optional — is the one that sticks with the Thiessens. Not the ideology. Not the partisan tribalism. The simple, specific question of whether the people they elected are being straight with them about what is happening with their money.
The PRC Editorial View
This publication does not endorse political parties. What it does insist on — regardless of which party is in power — is fiscal honesty, policy coherence, and the kind of basic accountability to citizens that democratic government is supposed to guarantee.
The Kinew government's first full year falls short on all three measures.
The social media ban is a policy that deserves a serious debate — about efficacy, enforcement, constitutional scope, and the genuine harms it claims to address. That debate cannot happen honestly when it is deployed, as it appears to have been, partly as a narrative tool to fill the political air while uncomfortable fiscal data stays unpublished.
The budget deficit is a real number that reflects real choices. Those choices may ultimately prove defensible. But defending them requires publishing the numbers, not burying the quarterly updates and attributing the gap to Donald Trump's trade policy when the majority of the overage traces to domestic spending decisions the government made on its own.
And the specific experiences of families like the Thiessens — who are not ideologues, who have voted for multiple parties, who judge governments by what shows up in their mailbox and how long they wait in an emergency room — are the most reliable indicator of whether a government's narrative matches its record.
In Steinbach, on a Tuesday morning, the narrative and the record are not matching.
Thank God, as Karen Thiessen might say, the federal NDP doesn't run the country. The provincial one has given her enough to think about.
Key takeaways
- The Manitoba NDP's social media ban restricts those under 16 from platforms without parental consent — critics say it is unenforceable and was timed to distract from fiscal problems.
- Manitoba's 2024-25 budget deficit of approximately $2 billion exceeded NDP pre-election projections; fiscal analysts attribute most of the overage to domestic spending decisions, not Trump-era trade disruption.
- The Kinew government eliminated the quarterly fiscal update publication that existed under the previous PC administration, reducing the frequency of public budget accountability data.
- Emergency room wait times at major Winnipeg hospitals remained above pre-pandemic levels through the 2025-26 winter despite NDP healthcare investment announcements.
- The federal NDP's supply-and-confidence arrangement with the Trudeau Liberals damaged the party's national brand and created a rhetorical liability for Wab Kinew's provincial government.
- Rural and small-city Manitoba families — represented here by the fictional but composite Thiessen family of Steinbach — report a gap between NDP government announcements and lived economic experience.
- Conservative strategists view the NDP's combination of overreaching symbolic policy, underdisclosed fiscal data, and external blame-shifting as a strong narrative platform heading into the next provincial election cycle.
Frequently asked questions
- What is Manitoba's social media ban for youth?
- The Manitoba NDP government under Premier Wab Kinew passed legislation requiring social media platforms to verify user ages and restrict access for those under 16 without explicit parental consent. The law follows similar moves in Nova Scotia, British Columbia, and Ontario, and is framed by the government as a child-protection measure. Critics argue the legislation is difficult to enforce — users simply use other devices or accounts — and that its timing coincided with uncomfortable fiscal disclosures the government wanted off the front page.
- How large is Manitoba's budget deficit under the NDP?
- The Kinew government's first full budget, tabled in spring 2024, projected a deficit of approximately $2 billion — significantly larger than NDP pre-election projections. The Manitoba Financial Advisory Council noted that the majority of the spending overage reflected domestic decisions: public sector wage settlements, capital project overruns, and expanded social program eligibility. The government attributed a portion of the shortfall to economic headwinds from Donald Trump's tariff agenda, a claim fiscal analysts have largely characterised as overstated.
- What has the Manitoba NDP changed about fiscal transparency?
- The Kinew government eliminated the quarterly fiscal updates that had been published under the previous Progressive Conservative administration. The government described this as streamlining reporting; opposition critics and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation characterised it as a reduction in public accountability that makes it harder for Manitobans to assess whether budget projections are being met between annual budget days.
- What is the NDP's record on Manitoba healthcare?
- The Kinew government announced a nursing recruitment strategy, physician retention bonuses, and a new urgent care centre in north Winnipeg. Emergency room wait times at major Winnipeg hospitals, however, remained above pre-pandemic levels through the 2025-26 winter according to Winnipeg Regional Health Authority data. The government also stopped publishing the monthly ER wait time dashboard that had been public under the previous PC administration.
- Is the Manitoba NDP blaming Trump for its deficit?
- The Kinew government has cited Donald Trump's tariff agenda as a contributing factor to Manitoba's fiscal challenges, pointing to impacts on the province's grain, canola, pork, and beef export economy. Fiscal analysts at the Manitoba Financial Advisory Council and independent economists have noted that while the trade environment created some headwinds, the majority of Manitoba's budget overage traces to domestic spending decisions made before the most aggressive tariff measures took effect.
- How does the federal NDP's record affect Manitoba's NDP government?
- The federal NDP under Jagmeet Singh spent the final sessions of the Trudeau Parliament propping up the Liberal minority government through a supply-and-confidence agreement. The arrangement is widely credited with prolonging a Liberal administration that had, by most polling measures, lost public confidence. Conservative messaging in Manitoba has connected Wab Kinew's provincial NDP record to the federal party's reputation — particularly on spending, accountability, and the tendency to position government action as protection rather than constraint.
- What are the Manitoba PCs saying about the NDP's record?
- PC leader Wayne Ewasko has focused criticism on process and accountability: the elimination of quarterly fiscal reports, the gap between NDP spending projections and actual outcomes, and what he characterises as the government's use of high-profile legislation — including the social media ban — to manage news cycles rather than address structural policy problems. The PCs have been more cautious about attacking the substance of the social media ban directly, recognising that suburban Manitoba voters are broadly sympathetic to measures addressing adolescent online harm.
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