Manitoba COVID-19 state of emergency expires after 19 months

Manitoba's COVID-19 state of emergency is set to expire Thursday afternoon after first being declared 19 months ago, the province says in a news release.

All Manitoba's current public health orders are still in effect. People are also still encouraged to keep following public health guidelines around wearing masks and getting vaccinated to blunt the impact of a fourth wave in the province.

But the emergency order first declared on March 20, 2020, is "no longer required to help the province protect Manitobans from the impacts of COVID-19," the release said. It will expire at 4 p.m.

That's in part because more than 82 per cent of eligible Manitobans are now fully vaccinated, which is helping to better control the spread of the illness, Premier Kelvin Goertzen said in the news release.

The order marked what appeared to be the first time on record that Manitoba declared a provincewide state of emergency.

The order allowed the province to make several changes under the Emergency Measures Act that went beyond the scope of the Public Health Act, the release said.

The government used those powers, for example, to bring in orders barring care home staff from moving between sites.

But the state of emergency is no longer needed for that, since the Public Health Act was amended to be able to address that issue itself, the release said.

The state of emergency also let the province make temporary suspension orders to allow certain corporate meetings to happen virtually and to enable commissioning and witnessing to be done remotely. 

Other temporary suspensions were made to provide "relief related to youth exiting care under the Child and Family Services Act," the release said.

The powers also allowed Manitoba to extend provincial government reporting deadlines in the 2020-21 year "as organizational resources were redeployed to address the impacts of the pandemic."

While the state of emergency is ending, the province can still issue public health orders without it. 

The government can also declare a new state of emergency in the future if it's needed, the release said.