Friday, December 15, 2006
Top 5 Reasons Bob Rae is wrong about the NDP - Friday October 27, 2006
by Judy Wasylycia-Leis, MP (Winnipeg-North)Finance Critic, New Democratic Party of Canada
While Canada’s NDP believes that prosperity and social justice are two-sides of the same coin, it appears that Liberal leadership contestant Bob Rae disagrees. It is also appears that he will say anything to appeal to his new friends in the Liberal Party.
The proof of Mr. Rae’s new duplicity is conveniently laid out in a recent book by the former Ontario NDP leader, turned Liberal leadership aspirant. But librarians, book store owners and struggling insomniacs should take note: Mr. Rae’s book belongs in the fiction section. Here are five reasons why.
Reason #1: Mr. Rae suggests that his thinking has evolved, while the NDP has stood still and because of this the NDP has “confined themselves to an ever smaller universe”. Wrong. Under Jack Layton’s leadership, the NDP is a party committed to balanced budgets, a tax system that both encourages corporations to invest and build prosperity and that includes incentives so that environmentally sustainable choices are profitable ones. Because of this, the NDP’s universe has not shrunk but rather increased by 1.5 million votes in the last two elections. It’s actually the Liberal Party whose universe has shrunk by 800,000 votes in the past two campaigns.
Reason #2: It is now Mr. Rae’s opinion that the NDP is more interested being a party of protest than a party of government. Wrong. For 13 years, Canadians waited with increasing impatience as a succession of Liberal majority governments failed to deliver the promises they made on the environment, housing, foreign aid and tuition fees. It was not until Canadians elected a minority Liberal government with a strong NDP caucus that we began to see progress. We re-wrote a lopsided federal budget and made it better for ordinary people.
Governing to make life better for everyday families was the message that Manitoba Premier Gary Doer and Saskatchewan cabinet minister Pat Atkinson delivered to our September convention in Quebec City. It is also why Jack Layton is asking the people of Canada to hire him as their next prime minister. And why we are going to lay out a careful, prudent plan for how to get this country back on track one practical step at a time. For years we’ve been making a difference – now we‘re running to make government.
Reason #3: Mr. Rae says that the NDP doesn’t understand the need for balance in government. Wrong. On this count, he is repeating a groundless orthodoxy that his succession of deficits in Ontario helped to create. The irony is lost on Mr. Rae. The fact is no other party has a better record for balanced budgets than the NDP. None. Data from the federal department of finance confirm that provincial NDP governments - not Liberal or Conservative ones - have had the best record of staying out of the red over the past two decades. This calculation even includes the deficits that Mr. Rae was responsible for in Ontario. As someone who participated in creating 20 balanced budgets in his years of public life, Jack Layton comes from the school of balanced governance. Mr. Rae may want to consider his own qualifications before he agrees to pit his record of fiscal balance against Mr. Layton’s.
Reason #4: Mr. Rae claims that the NDP possesses a “knee jerk reaction to business entrepreneurship and wealth creation.” Wrong. We believe the private sector plays a vital role in our economy and under Jack Layton's leadership the NDP have run on platforms that foster business entrepreneurship and expand wealth creation. In fact in the last election campaign 30 NDP candidates were business people from many sectors. We know that wealth creation is a prerequisite for the kind of society we want Canada to be. Compare that to the Liberals who have overseen a slowdown in productivity growth, because just like Stephen Harper, the economic lever they rely on too heavily are tax cuts. Not only is this approach lacking in imagination it is just plain wrong. Study after study shows that investment goes where public institutions are efficient and transparent, where costs are lower because of comprehensive health care, and where there is a highly motivated and skilled workforce. Taxes are just one factor, and not a particularly high one for investment. Jack Layton gets this. He understands that meeting the challenges facing the Canadian economy in the next decade will require investments in education, health care and the environment.
Reason #5: By throwing his lot in with the Liberal Party, Mr. Rae must now account for and defend the record of failure and corruption that have caused Canadians to break company with the party of Ad-Scam and environmental neglect. But he doesn’t.
In his book he describes the 1995 federal budget that unilaterally cut $25 billion from federal transfers in support of health and education as “the greatest achievement” of the Chretien-Martin years. Contrast this with Mr. Rae’s reaction in the Toronto Star at the time saying that “we should not underestimate the historic nature of what Mr. Martin announced” and that it “literally ends the Canada that we've known and sets us on a much meaner course.” The gulf between what Mr. Rae writes today and what he said in 1995 swallows his credibility whole.
Equally astonishing Mr. Rae says in his book “children living in poverty are a challenge to our conscience and to our future.” Having written this, it boggles the mind why he would today line up with a party who, in 1989 voted to eliminate child poverty by 2000, but allowed it to increase to the point where 1.2 million children were still living in poverty by the time the Liberals were defeated in 2006: a number that has risen by 20% over the past decade.
To a Toronto Life reporter in 1995, Rae said "The worst thing anyone can do is lose their integrity." He is right. And there is no field of endeavour where this is truer than public life, where the only currency is the trust a politician keeps with the people they represent.
Consider that less than 12 months ago, Mr. Rae was writing cheques to support NDP candidates in the federal election. The London Free Press reported that he was thrilled with the NDP's election results, winning 29 seats across Canada -- 11 more than in the last Parliament. Yet, today he vilifies us and seeks a home in the Liberal Party he used to call “smug” and “a four- or five-headed monster that does one thing when in opposition and another thing in government.”
It is fitting that Mr. Rae chose Halloween to release this book. More trick than treat, it is crass partisanship and revisionism masquerading as facts. Canadians will be right to not answer the door when this ghoul comes calling.
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