NDP says Harper broke promises

Reduced share of health-care funding and increase in OAS eligibility cited

OTTAWA – Opposition leaders Thursday were quick to denounce the Flaherty budget as brutal for seniors and Quebec while doing little to create much-needed employment.

New democratic party leader Thomas Mulcair pounced, saying the Conservative government – as he predicted a day earlier – is recklessly cutting essential services such as Old Age Security.

Mulcair reminded reporters Prime Minister Stephen Harper last June pledged not to cut pension or transfers to the provinces for health.

“We can see that Stephen Harper is not a man of his word,” Mulcair told The Gazette. “They got elected on a promise to create jobs. They’re confirming now tens of billions of dollars in cuts to health care.”

Muclair based his healthcut argument on Harper’s decision to unilaterally impose a new health transfer funding formula on the provinces.

He said that means provinces will end up cutting costs by allowing for more and more private services, which runs against the principles of the Canada Health Act.

For some families, it will mean the difference between seeing a doctor and putting groceries on the table, he said.

“That institution (health) is at risk because we’re headed straight to privatization,” Mulcair said. “We’re headed straight to two-tier health care.”

Bloc Québécois leader Daniel Paillé accused Finance Minister Jim Flaherty of “attacking the foundations of our social safety net: govern-

“We can see that Stephen Harper is not a man of his word.”

NDP LEADER THOMAS MULCAIR

ment services and Old Age Security.”

Ottawa has nothing to back up its decision to increase the eligibility age for Old Age Security to 67, from 65, beginning in 2023, Paillé added.

“When you ask: Do you have actuarial studies?, finance department officials look embarrassed,” he said.

“Either it’s amateur hour and they have no idea how much it will save the government to move to 67 years or they’re hiding things.”

The budget contained no cash for provinces to build new prisons expected to be required due to the federal tough-on-crime bill.

“On prisons, there’s nothing, a total zip,” Paillé said.

And he said it’s “undemocratic” for Ottawa to cut Elections Canada’s funding by $7.5 million a year, beginning in 2012-13.

“The poor chief electoral officer has investigations to do and the Conservatives say, ‘Oh, by the way, we’re going to cut your budget.”

Paillé also blasted Ottawa for “taking an axe to culture, including drastic reductions at the CBC.” In Quebec City, Finance Minister Raymond Bachand held out the threat Thursday of an election defeat as leverage to force Flaherty to roll back his plans to cut health care transfers to the provinces.

“There is going to be another federal election,” Bachand said. “We have time to put that once again in the political arena.”

Premier Jean Charest and the other premiers will work together to persuade Harper to restore Ottawa’s share of health care funding, he added.

Charest recalled this week that when then-prime minister Lester Pearson proposed a coast-to-coast medicare system in 1967, he committed Ottawa to pay half the cost.

The 2004 Romanow commission, named by Ottawa, said the federal share should be 25 per cent, Charest noted.

Now it is 20 per cent, and by 2024 – with Harper’s proposal to cap increases in health transfers at three per cent a year after 2018 – Ottawa will pay 11 per cent of health-care costs, he said.

As well, a change in the transfer formula would make health-care funding allocated on a per-capita basis, penalizing Quebec and other provinces with lower population growth and favouring Western Canada, where the resource economy is booming and the population is growing.

Bachand complained Ottawa is “gradually getting out of their obligations to pay for health care.”

On other budget matters, Bachand applauded Ottawa’s proposed pooled pensions – equivalent to the Voluntary Saving Retirement Plan he announced in his Quebec budget last week.

But he called “incomprehensible” Flaherty’s plan to go ahead with a Canadian securities commission to regulate stock markets, pointing out that Quebec won a Supreme Court ruling that securities regulation lies within provincial jurisdiction.