MONTREAL – Taxpayers shouldn’t be expected to help pay for new major league sports franchises when there are hundreds of thousands of Canadian children living in poverty, NDP Leader Tom Mulcair said Friday.
Bringing back major league teams is a hot topic across Quebec, with both Quebec City and Montreal looking to regain lost franchises, but Mulcair said sports fans shouldn’t expect any help from the federal government.
“I think that nothing would be better than for the private sector to get together and put everything in place to have a Major League Baseball team (in Montreal),” he said.
“But in a society that knows still to this day far too much poverty and when I have hundreds of thousands of children going to school hungry, it’s hard to understand that the taxpayer would be asked to fork over money for franchises that are worth billions.”
Media giant Quebecor officially submitted a bid in July to bring back an NHL team to Quebec City after hundreds of millions of municipal and provincial dollars financed a new arena.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre is one of the city’s biggest cheerleaders for the return of the Expos, but the discussion is pure speculation, as most agree a comeback of Major League Baseball in Quebec is at least several years away.
In-Depth: Federal Election 2015
Much of Mulcair’s speech Friday focused on his party’s plan to alleviate poverty.
He reiterated the NDP’s pledge to increase the Guaranteed Income Supplement benefits to Old Age Security and to lower the age of eligibility for government pensions back to 65 from 67.
On the subject of child poverty, Mulcair added that an NDP government would cancel the tax credit for stock options that he said mostly “benefits the wealthy” and use it to help fight child hunger.
“In the NDP we just don’t accept that the people who built our country – our seniors – should be living in deep poverty,” he said. “And we don’t accept that hundreds of thousands of Canadian children go to school in the morning hungry – we will change both those realities.”
Mulcair on Friday introduced his newly elected candidate, James Hughes, for the central Montreal riding of Notre-Dame-de-Grace-Westmount, which withstood the NDP’s so-called orange wave in 2011.
The riding, then known as Westmount-Ville-Marie, was held in the last Parliament by Liberal Marc Garneau, the first Canadian in space. He won the riding in 2008 by 9,000 voters and was re-election by only a few hundred votes in 2011.
Hughes is a former New Brunswick deputy minister and an anti-poverty advocate who used to run the Old Brewery Mission, a well-known homeless shelter in Montreal.
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