OTTAWA – The federal Liberal party must stop trying to be “everything to everybody” if it wants to form the next government, says Martha Hall Findlay, who’s running to lead the party.
“We can’t just keep talking,” Hall Findlay said during an appearance on the Global News program The West Block with Tom Clark. “We can’t just keep saying the same things that we said in 2006. We have to start getting things done and we have to start standing up for what we believe.
Hall Findlay also ran for the Liberal leadership in 2006 but lost to Stephane Dion. Since that attempt, she said “what we’ve really done is managed to lose two more elections.”
Dion led the Liberals to a second-place finish in the 2008 election, in which the Conservatives added to the strength of their minority government.
In 2011 – a year that Hall Findlay described as “terrible for the Liberal party” – Michael Ignatieff led the party to third place in the federal election; the NDP took over as official Opposition; and Harper’s Conservatives won their coveted majority government.
Hall Findlay was a Liberal MP for the Ontario riding of Willowdale after she won a byelection 2008. She was re-elected in the general election that same year but lost to Conservative Chungsen Leung in 2011. Hall Findlay said that loss should not be seen a liability in her ability to lead the party.
Hall Findlay is facing an uphill battle against Justin Trudeau, for whom polls have indicated could lead the Liberals to victory over the Tories.
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The son of the late former prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, has taken some controversial positions, including calling the repealed long-gun registry a “failure” even though he voted to maintain it. He also voiced support for more unconstrained policies on foreign investment than the government’s new limits on takeovers by state-owned enterprises following approval for China’s CNOOC Ltd. to buy Canada’s Nexen Inc.
When asked about Trudeau’s favourable polling, Hall Findlay said: “There’s a huge difference between celebrity and what will actually happen after April and what will happen in 2015,” making references to dates for the Liberal leadership vote and the next scheduled general election, respectively.
“Whatever a poll says now, it’s going to change a month from now. There’s going to be a whole lot more attention paid to this leadership race, a whole lot more people will know much more about the individual candidates.”
Other candidates for the Liberal leadership include Marc Garneau, Deborah Coyne, Karen McCrimmon, Joyce Murray and George Takach.
Hall Findlay was asked to give her positions – in one sentence – on three specific issues, which Clark said would be asked of all Liberal leadership candidates appearing on the show.
On whether the British Columbia government should be compensated for allowing a pipeline though its province – such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline – meant to get oil from Alberta to the West Coast for overseas export – Hall Findlay said: “From private sector, not from other provinces.”
B.C. Premier Christy Clark has said her province, which would bear most of the environmental risk from this pipeline, should get a bigger share of the economic benefits of such a project, of which she said Alberta stands to get the most.
On whether Canada should accept higher drug costs at home as a concession in free-trade negotiations with the European Union, Hall Findlay said: “We would love to see more access to generic drugs simply because we know that that’s less expensive for our overall health-care system. But you also know that’s not a short-answer question because we have intellectual-property-regime requirements that encourage the research that’s needed for the patent-based drug companies.”
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