EDMONTON – Former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin blasted the Conservative government Saturday for squandering federal surpluses and putting Canada’s healthcare network in jeopardy.
Joining Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s election tour, Martin said the figures in the Tory platform were not crediblen including billions of dollars in proposed cuts that did not appear in the federal budget last month.Greeting a large crowd of hundreds, Ignatieff joked about the Tory’s fiscal record in government.
He noted that no Conservative prime minister had eliminated a federal deficit since John A. Macdonald in 1889.
He said a Liberal government would succeed at eliminating the current federal deficit like Martin.
“We did it once, we’ll do it another time,” Ignatieff said.
He also repeated the same message to the crowd from one night earlier, urging them to “rise up” and stop the Harper to save their country and democracy.
He noted that there was another incident involving people being asked to leave a Tory event Saturday in British Columbia because they were Liberals.
At a news conference with Martin, Ignatieff said that Harper must take responsibility for this incident as well as other similar cases during the campaign including one involving a woman who was tossed out of a Tory event because of her Liberal ties on the online Facebook social networking website.
“He’s just got to stop doing this right now and also stop blaming other people,” said Ignatieff. “He’s got to fess up and take responsibility. It’s weak leadership, not strong leadership, to pretend it’s someone else’s fault.”
Meantime, Martin acknowledged that the former Liberal government had cut healthcare transfer payments in the 1990s while he was balancing the budget.
But he said, in the end, it protected healthcare spending and allowed his government to sign a $41-billion, ten-year health accord with the provinces in 2004.
“Look at countries like Greece and Portugal and the cuts that they are making now,” Martin said. “Canada went down that path, and I am proud… We did that to protect healthcare and we would have never been able to invest $41 billion in healthcare, if we had not acted in 1995.”
Ignatieff also told reporters that the Liberal party’s climate change policies were based on fairness, and would ensure that wealth doesn’t get transferred out of Alberta through a proposed cap and trade system of cracking down on pollution.
He noted that the Tories had pledged to take the same approach in the 2008 election, while he warned that the NDP was proposing a policy that would see Alberta’s wealth going to the eastern part of the country.
Mdesouza@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/mikedesouza
