Layton blasts Liberals during BC university speech

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 Simon Fraser University.

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.

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 empathise 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,” said Layton. “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.”

Layton also blasted the Liberal's environmental record regarding 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.