Manitoba’s Open-Trade Talk Meets Closed-Shop Reality

Wab Kinew vowed to tear down trade barriers but his jobs agreement favouring unions, shuts out independent contractors and drives up costs for taxpayers

After vowing to help tear down economic barriers in Canada, the Manitoba government has returned to building fresh ones at home.

Photo by Lallaoke on Unsplash

On Sept. 16, 2025, Premier Wab Kinew announced what he called a “landmark jobs agreement” with the Manitoba Building Trades, an umbrella group of construction unions. The province, he said, would build four new schools: two in Winnipeg, one in West St. Paul and one in Brandon, under a new framework meant to “create good, family-supporting jobs.”

Behind that easy phrase sits a new set of rules.

Under the Manitoba Jobs Agreement, every contractor working on these schools must follow union-level standards for wages, benefits and apprenticeships, and must “prioritize Manitoba workers.” Any public project worth more than $50 million, a threshold that would capture most new hospitals, highways and major schools, will follow the same formula. It sounds like inclusion, but it functions as exclusion. Contractors outside the Building Trades or unwilling to meet their conditions will, in practice, be excluded unless they comply.

This is the first real test of the premier’s economic policy, and it tells Manitobans more than any press release about where his government stands.

Earlier this year, the same leader stood beside Ontario Premier Doug Ford to promise the opposite: to “tear down trade barriers,” already estimated to cost Canadians billions each year, and build a freer Canadian economy. He spoke of goods and workers moving easily between provinces and celebrated new memoranda to cut red tape. At that moment, he seemed to champion open markets and opportunity.

Only a few months later, his government is erecting fresh obstacles at home. The new rules do not free the market; they confine it. They do not let Manitobans compete on merit; they decide in advance who gets the work. The contradiction could not be clearer.

This is not the old story of broken promises but the new art of double meaning. When the premier speaks of “reducing barriers,” he means removing obstacles to government coordination, not to private enterprise. And when he speaks of “fairness,” he means equality within the system his government designs, not equality in the open contest of skill and initiative that fairness once meant.

The Manitoba Jobs Agreement is corporatism dressed up as compassion. Corporatism is the arrangement by which the state and organized interests, such as unions or large firms, govern the economy together. It divides control and reward while limiting the freedom of everyone outside the arrangement. It promises harmony but delivers dependency, as power flows upward to those who sit nearest the table.

Under this system, the government guarantees steady work for favoured groups and predictable outcomes for planners, but it narrows freedom for everyone else. Independent contractors and small firms lose equal footing. Taxpayers will pay the higher cost that comes with curbed competition.

One need not be hostile to labour to see the flaw. The dignity of work lies in its independence, not in its subordination to political favour. A free worker should be able to build a school for the province without first joining a government-approved guild.

A government that believes in opportunity must trust its citizens to work freely and compete fairly. Renewing Canada by tearing down old walls cannot begin with building new ones at home.

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This piece was written for, and recently appeared in, the Winnipeg Sun.