BURNABY, B.C. (CUP) — Only days after announcing that his party was ending its support of the Liberal government, NDP leader Jack Layton gave a speech at SFU as part of the Political Science Student Union Speaker Series.
The lecture hall where Layton delivered his speech was filled to capacity and many students who showed up late had to be turned away at the door.
Already in campaign mode, Layton began his speech by blasting the misdeeds of the Liberal government and spoke of the mandate that voters had given his party in the last election.
During the last election “2.1 million Canadians asked [the NDP] to go to Ottawa to get some things done,” said Layton.
He then detailed the accomplishments the NDP has made over the last year in areas like education, affordable housing, the environment, and public health care.
Attempting to empathize with the crowd of students before him, Layton said, “Nowadays so many students are struggling with two, sometimes three part-time jobs . . . and they are exhausted . . . they are stressed out and it’s wrong.”
He added, “Not only that, but [students] end up graduating with enormous debts on their shoulders.”
Layton then described how last year the NDP convinced the Liberals to cancel $4.6 billion worth of corporate tax cuts in the federal budget and instead invest that money into social programs.
“We told [the Liberals] to cancel that corporate tax cut and take $1.5 billion of that and put it right into post-secondary education to reduce the costs facing students.”
The NDP leader also discussed the “crisis of affordable housing in this country” and how his party’s efforts have ensured that $1.6 billion will be going “into the construction of affordable housing over the next two years.”
When discussing the environment, Layton blasted Canada’s poor environmental record and the Liberal government’s failure to honour its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“In Canada we have the worst record of any of the developed countries in terms of how much pollution has gone up since we [signed the Kyoto Protocol],” he said.
“Our pollution has gone up dramatically in this country, over 20 per cent, even though [Paul Martin] promised in the late ’80s, when he was environment critic for the Liberals, that we would reduce pollution by 20 per cent by 2005.”
Layton then offered a blistering critique of the Liberals’ record on public health care.
The Prime Minister is “not willing to protect public medicare, it has been slipping through our fingers for the last decade dramatically,” he said.
It was the Liberal government’s failure to protect health care that ultimately led the NDP to withdraw its support from the Liberals.
In a phone interview after his speech, Layton further explained that his party was not asking the government for more health care dollars but only wanted the Liberals to stop the growth of private health care in Canada, which they refused to do.
“[We] have got to stop what’s becoming a more and more frequent process where health care services are becoming more and more for profit . . . we want to see the funds go to [health care workers] rather than to investors on Wall Street and Bay Street,” he said. “Most Canadians want the health care system kept public.”
When asked if the NDP would reconsider its position should the Liberals suddenly give in to NDP demands, Layton said, “That’s very hypothetical. I don’t see the Liberals reversing themselves at all, so I don’t think we have to speculate on what would have to happen if they did.”
