Interview with Jack Layton
Leader, Canada's New Democratic Party
- 19 February, 2004

On Wednesday, February 23, 2005, the Liberal minority government will introduced its first federal budget in the House of Commons. Federal New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton shared his thoughts with the IAMAW on what he would like to see in this budget and what may happen if it falls short of expectations.


Question: There is a spectre of the potential for a non-confidence vote over this budget. Do you see that happening?

Layton: Well I sure hope not. On the other hand, if people ask me whether the NDP was going to vote for the budget no matter what it says - well, no Canadian would expect me to say we’re going to support it just because we don’t want an election. We wouldn’t be doing our job. Our job is to scrutinize that budget and compare it against what the Liberals promised and what we promised.

Question: Is that a tough sell to the average voter out there?

Layton: I think if people ask whether we’re just going to bring down the government to cause an election that Canadian’s don’t want, it would be a hard sell.

Canadians, I think, sent us here not to just simply say okay we’re a party that’s just going to agree with everything the government proposes. I mean, nobody would expect us to do that. So on an issue like the budget, we have to be prepared to look at it. We told the government ahead of time what we think is important back in December. We’re going to be looking for a National Childcare Program. I told them if they come out with a childcare program, we’ll like that and we’ll say so. We want it public, non-profit and we want it in the context of legislation: we don’t want the money just trickling away through provinces that aren’t committed to it. There must be accountability.

Secondly, we want investment in our cities and in our infrastructure. We want the gas tax to pay for rail and transit, as well as affordable housing through infrastructure. And we said we want to increase Foreign Aid. The tsunami has shown that Canadians want to see more work in that area and they don’t like the fact that we’re 33rd on the list of nations when we used to be in the top ten.

On the Kyoto Accord: Canadians want us to be at the front of the pack. So we laid out a plan. It’s on our web site, www.ndp.ca. I encourage people to go visit it. Our Kyoto Plan is being touted as the only coast-to-coast plan that shows how we can get there. And it creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. We’ve got these enormous potentials but you’ve got to get moving, you can’t just sit there and wait for the market to react because it’s not happening. We’re pushing hard and we’ve told the Liberals that we expect a really aggressive plan and if they don’t have it we couldn’t, in good conscience, support the government. Now this may mean some negotiations between the budget speech and, the vote itself, which takes place ten days later. We’ll have to see how that goes.