Campaigning with Michael Ignatieff, former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin said that Reform-Alliance members urged him to cut more healthcare funding in the 1990s
VANCOUVER-Federal Liberals pledged Sunday to convene a first ministers meeting on healthcare within two months of forming a government.
“It’s time to step up and show pan-Canadian leadership of the kind that I think the federal government must do,” Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said after visiting a local bakery.Campaigning with former prime minister Paul Martin and former Liberal health minister Ujjal Dosanjh, Ignatieff’s team reminded reporters about the Tory’s Reform-Alliance party past, while noting that Conservative leader Stephen Harper had not convened such a meeting on healthcare after five years as prime minister.
But Ignatieff said that the Liberals would convene a summit with provincial premiers, setting homecare and drug insurance coverage as priorities.
He said Harper delayed progress after Martin’s government signed a 2004 health accord offering billions of dollars in new investments for the provinces over ten years.
The deal was supposed to include new discussions and consultations about improving services in areas such as homecare or pharmacare.
“What happened?” Ignatieff asked. “Harper gets into government and he doesn’t take any leadership on health for five years. Nothing. He puts the six per cent in. But there’s no leadership to improve the system to work together to make the system work more effectively.”
He also said he doesn’t believe the numbers add up in the Tory platform and the recent federal budget, which suggest billions of dollars in healthcare spending is at risk.
Ignatieff said it was essential to start discussions now to successfully extend a health accord in 2014.
The Conservatives noted that Martin was a finance minister who also cut billions in federal healthcare transfers to the provinces in the 1990s.
But Martin defended the cuts, explaining that he had been scared that Canada was on the verge of cutting a dangerous tipping point as is the case now for highly indebted countries in Europe such as Greece, Portugal and Ireland.
“The fact is that at the time we brought down the deficit, what happened was the Reform-Alliance… that is the current Conservative party – they said you got to cut much further into healthcare. You got to cut into education,” Martin said.
Dosanjh, also compared the Conservatives to the former Reform party, because of a recently-leaked memo that revealed the Tory strategy, led by Citizenship, Multiculturalism and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, to target “very ethnic” ridings.
“Somehow Mr. Kenney has no ethnicity, he dropped in from the sky,” Dosanjh said with a hint of sarcasm. “That’s an absolute shame, and that shows the true colour in the nature and the spirit of the Reform-Alliance and it’s alive and kicking in this goverment.”
He also suggested that the Conservative government was responsible for delays in visa applications for family reunifications in Canada of new immigrants with a backlog that has risen from about 100,000 to 150,000 applications over the past five years.
Meantime, commenting on a recent successful leadership review for Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois, Ignatieff reiterated his view that sovereignty was not the best solution for Quebec’s future.
He said that Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe and Marois have the democratic right to launch Quebec into another debate about sovereignty, but he said he would defend Canada and ask Quebecers in that debate whether they believe it would actually resolve their deepest concerns.
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