Couillard targets jobs, economy
Liberal leader vows to restore infrastructure spending in first 100 days
Liberal Leader Philippe Couillard confirmed economic heavyweights Jacques Daoust, Carlos Leitao and Martin Coiteux will run as Liberal candidates. Couillard also committed a future Liberal government to the creation of 250,000 jobs, reviving the Plan Nord and backing Mayor Denis Coderre’s pet project of covering part of the VilleMarie Expressway.
A Liberal government, focused on jobs and economic development, would go ahead with Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre’s pet project to cover the eastern portion of the Ville-Marie Expressway.
“It’s a scar for Montreal,” party leader Philippe Couillard told a news conference Thursday, where he committed a future Liberal government to the creation of 250,000 jobs and officially unveiled his “economic trio” of candidates.
“When we decided to put the CHUM in the eastern part of downtown Montreal, it was both first and foremost a health-care project, but it’s also a project for the development of the city of Montreal, urban renewal,” Couillard said, referring to the new Uni- versité de Montréal teaching hospital.
Couillard said covering the western portion of the Ville-Marie “cost a couple of hundred million,” acknowledging that finishing the job “would probably cost more.”
“But it generated much more in private investment. The same will happen this time.”
Couillard said a “healthcare district” would grow up around the new CHUM and its research centre.
The Parti Québécois government has said there is no money to cover the VilleMarie. Couillard said a Liberal government would go ahead after the new Turcot Interchange is completed.
Couillard, in his first election campaign event in Montreal, confirmed Jacques Daoust, Carlos Leitao and Martin Coiteux as Liberal candidates for the April 7 election.
He admitted his party’s goal to create 250,000 jobs over the next five years is the same commitment Jean Charest made as Liberal leader at the start of the 2012 election campaign. But he said in addition to reviving Charest’s Plan Nord, a Couillard government wants to develop maritime transport.
Daoust, former head of Investissement Québec, the government’s investment arm, said he is running in Verdun “because the game has changed,” faulting the PQ management of the economy.
Leitao, chief economist for the Laurentian Bank of Canada and now Liberal candidate in West Island Robert-Baldwin, described the impact of the PQ win in 2012 as “catastrophic,” adding that the best decision by Premier Pauline Marois for the economy was “calling the election.”
Under the PQ, “the private sector just stopped investing and the economy started to slow,” Leitao said.
As an immigrant, the Portuguese-born Leitao added, he has always felt welcome in Quebec. The PQ Charter of Quebec Values has changed that. “The politics of exclusion in a multi-ethnic society, like the one we have in Montreal, is extremely dangerous,” he said. “That’s not the Quebec I know.”
Coiteux, an economic specialist with the Bank of Canada, is running in Nelligan riding, free with the departure of former Liberal minister Yolande James.
Coiteux said he is running because he is concerned about the future of his children. He criticized the PQ for imposing a retroactive 1.75 per cent income-tax hike on taxable incomes above $100,000 and “declaring war on the Plan Nord.”
“Quebecers deserve better than the PQ when it comes to the economy,” Couillard said. “Economic growth will allow us to better finance our public services, to reach and maintain a balanced budget, to reduce the debt burden on future generations and to reduce taxes that are too heavy for the middle class.”
Couillard pledged that in its first 100 days, a Liberal government under his leadership would restore $15 billion in infrastructure spending suspended by the PQ.
It would introduce a tax credit for home renovation and present a budget offering foreign investors, Quebec and Canadian companies the necessary predictability and stability to invest.
The Liberals calculate Quebec lost 66,800 full-time jobs in 2013, the difference between the number of full-time jobs in December 2012 and December 2013, while PQ Finance Minister Nicolas Marceau and most economists say 47,800 new jobs were created in Quebec in 2013, a growing proportion of them part-time positions.
Couillard said the Liberal figure reflects “common sense.”
He said Quebec needs “quality, full-time jobs,” because with more reliance on part-time work, “how can you have stability for families? How can you make plans?”
Later in Shawinigan, at a rally with all of the Liberal candidates in the Mauricie region, Couillard responded to Marois’s ambiguous stand on a future referendum on sovereignty.
Couillard noted that Marois made no commitment to call a referendum and no commitment to not call a referendum,
“We don’t understand everything, but we are learning a lot,” Couillard said.
He recalled the lobster-trap analogy former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau used before the 1995 independence referendum to explain the PQ strategy of drawing support from federalist voters.
“We will get them into the lobster trap,” Couillard said, mimicking Parizeau. “Once they are in the trap — whoop — we close the door and then we have the referendum.”