Posted August 29, 2025
It has been 15 months since the Winnipeg Free Press published an article exposing the serious challenges facing mental health clinicians, social workers, nurses, and counsellors working at the Crisis Response Centre (CRC), a vital 24/7 facility that supports Manitobans in need of urgent mental health care.
Fifteen months later, and very little has changed. In fact, the situation has grown worse.
According to MAHCP members, staffing ratios are even worse, with just one mental health clinician often working overnight, when the baseline should be four – a vacancy rate of 75%. To make matters worse, Shared Health’s 2023-24 annual report shows a 20% rise in CRC walk-in visits from 2021-2024.
Mental health clinicians at CRC are frequently mandated to work 16-hour shifts, just to return eight hours later. Our members are burning out, leading to more sick calls, chronic understaffing, and longer patient wait times. Investing in adequate baseline staffing would not only improve safety, it would also make workloads more manageable and be more fiscally responsible than continued reliance on daily overtime payouts.
“Our members have acknowledged that some effort has been made to improve safety and security at CRC, but the staffing situation continues to be dire, infrastructure is substandard, and the 24/7 psychiatric services required to support high-acuity patients is still not available,” said Jason Linklater, MAHCP President. “Today, MAHCP is filing a grievance – yet another one to add to the many we’ve recently filed in support of our members working at CRC. They’ve endured significant mandated overtime and they’ve now been told they’re facing forced shift changes, proposed by CRC management as a solution to address vacancies.”
Mandating is a violation of MAHCP member rights.
Despite CRC management’s use of the term “required overtime”, we want to be clear: required overtime IS mandating, which contravenes our collective agreement and infringes upon workers’ rights. So do forced shift changes when imposed without fair notice.
“These are not workable, sustainable solutions. Health-care professionals cannot be expected to work 16-hour days in intense, stressful environments, and tolerate forcible movement from days to evenings or nights without fair notice. This is the definition of undue hardship and staff should never have to fix the problems created by an employer’s short-sightedness and poor planning.”
What’s the solution?
Last week, MAHCP proposed a practical solution to the staffing crisis: a call-out to other sites for mental health clinicians willing to pick up open shifts at CRC. As of now, we are told that 19 unfilled shifts remain over the course of the next week.
We continue to press the provincial government for action. In May, Linklater and three MAHCP members met with Honourable Bernadette Smith, Minister of Housing, Addictions and Mental Health, to share firsthand accounts on behalf of Manitoba’s health-care professionals working in the mental health field.
One of our members, a registered social worker and long-term employee of the CRC, who also picks up shifts at the Crisis Stabilization Unit (CSU) and Provincial Virtual Crisis Services, shared this powerful perspective:
“My colleagues and I support clients facing acute suicidality, psychosis, mania, depression, addictions, and psychosocial crises. At the CRC, my primary role is to perform mental health assessments and consult with psychiatry to develop care plans. Our services are under growing strain. We are seeing more clients, and the severity of their crises is increasing. Methamphetamine intoxication, opiate overdoses, and violent incidents are more common at the CRC. MAHCP staff at CRC are burning out.”
MAHCP member working at Crisis Response Centre since 2019