Local MP Nathan Cullen is predicting that the federal government will be brought down in a non-confidence vote by Friday afternoon. The conservative party tabled their federal budget on Tuesday afternoon and all three opposition parties said that they would not be voting for it. Unless one party changes its mind, an election is inevitable.
“I’d be very surprised if we made it all the way to Saturday or Monday, I think the government is very likely to fall at least by Friday afternoon,” says Cullen.
Cullen is also confirming that he will be running for re-election in the next campaign as the NDP candidate for Skeen-Buckley Valley. While he hasn’t had any strategy meetings yet, he says the central issue of his campaign will be” creating jobs without hammering our environment along the way.”
Before Tuesday it was not known for certain if the NDP would support the budget because the family tax credits the Conservatives were offering to get the party’s votes. But NDP leader Jack Layton condemned the budget soon after it was tabled saying that Stephen Harper “just doesn’t get it.”
Cullen says that the NDP had three caucus meetings over the last two days, and the message was that the Conservative budget did not offer enough on key issues for them to be able to support it. He pointed to the small increase for seniors living on fixed incomes as an example.
“Their priorities are just so out of wack, we’re going to talk about [the budget] again tomorrow morning, but the caucus was unified on this. I didn’t see any dissension in the ranks,” says Cullen.
A parliamentary committee released a report this week that found the Harper Government in contempt of parliament, making the Conservatives the only government to have ever been found in contempt. Many political commentators have said that after finding the government in contempt, the opposition could not realistically then go and support the budget.
Cullen says he has been going over the 350 page Budget document looking for policies that would have been beneficial to the region but says he hasn’t found any, and criticized the government for its continued subsidies for Oil Sands projects.
If the government falls to a non-confidence vote on Friday afternoon as Cullen thinks will happen, Prime Minister Harper would have to ask the Governor General to dissolve parliament on Monday and begin the 35-day election campaign. Which is something the Conservatives are arguing Canadians do not want. Cullen says he doesn’t buy that.
“It’s like saying, ‘do you want to go to the doctors?’ Maybe you need to, maybe you don’t but either way, you probably don’t want to.”