See text below
EXCERPTS
Canadians should not be expecting Liberals to unveil plans for national child care or any other big social programs in the next election campaign, says Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, because Conservatives have left the fiscal cupboard bare.
In an interview with the Star's editorial board on Thursday, Ignatieff laid out the main planks of the future Liberal election platform on social issues. They will be ambitious in the long term, but modest in the short term, Ignatieff said.
"All I can do as a responsible leader is say that there aren't 27 priorities for an incoming Liberal government," Ignatieff said. Instead, he said the Liberals will concentrate on about four themes in the social realm.
One part has already been unveiled this month - the so-called Family Care program to aid people who care for the sick and elderly at home.
As for the other parts, Ignatieff says that Canadians can also expect the Liberals to soon unveil proposals to help people with pension and retirement security and policy plans for child care and post-secondary education.
But Canada can't afford the large, sweeping kinds of programs the Liberals championed in past elections, Ignatieff said, largely because the country is $55.6 billion in deficit, as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced this week.
So instead of a national child care program - which was established by the Liberals from 2004-06 and dismantled when Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power - Ignatieff will be talking in a future election about increasing "child care spaces" in the country.
And instead of the past Liberal proposal to pay tuition for students in their first and last year of university, offered during the 2005-06 election campaign in which they were defeated, Ignatieff will be talking in more modest terms of tuition and debt relief for students.
"We can"t do them all simultaneously, but we know that"s the frame of what our priorities are. We have to fit these expenditures to the cloth, rather than the other way around," Ignatieff told the Star.
"We can't add to the carrying costs of the Canadian economy; we can't add to the load on Canadian taxpayers."
Liberals have been saying that much of their future promises will be financed by plans to freeze $6 billion in planned Conservative tax cuts to corporations, but Ignatieff also acknowledged that other cuts will probably have to be made to finance even the modest programs the Liberals will be proposing.
"We're certainly looking at other ways to achieve our social goals," he said. The $16 billion contract for fighter jets is one of the Conservatives' questionable expenses, he said, as are the billions of dollars that Harper's government proposes to spend on increasing prison spaces.
...
-reprinted from the Toronto Star