Leaders stick to message in final debate before election
Posted Oct 1, 2013 06:38:17 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It was more of the same during the provincial party leaders last debate before next Tuesday’s election.
All three men spent the hour hammering home their message on CTV and talking over each other to do it.
One such instance was when the candidates were asked when it’s OK to use taxpayer money for financial incentives for big companies.
Premier Darrell Dexter argued he was the only candidate who would fight to bring jobs to Nova Scotia, but Liberal leader Stephen McNeil took issue with that.
“With all due respect, I would say all three of us would fight to keep jobs, the difference is you would go with a chequebook that’s blank,” argued McNeil.
“You don’t get this,” responded Dexter. “It’s not about chequebooks it’s about pay cheques.”
The issue of whether it is ever OK to break an election promise also came up and Premier Dexter found himself answering questions about whether or not his government promised too much in 2009, since he raised the Harmonized Sales Tax by two percentage points shortly after he was elected on a platform which promised no tax increases.
“We didn’t stand idly by in the recession and say there was nothing we could do,” he said. “We tackled the challenges, we looked at where the opportunities were and we set Nova Scotia on a course to greater prosperity.”
By now it should be clear jobs, spending and the economy dominated the debate and the Premier fired perhaps the most colourful shot at McNeil during some of that discussion.
“You’ve been saying about our economic development record; you’ve put out ads that are fundamentally false,” he chided. “They’re so fundamentally false you might as well have accused me of the zombie apocalypse, you would have been more credible with that.”
McNeil stuck to his contention that the province’s books aren’t balanced and he was asked whether a Liberal government could balance the budget in its first year.
“The problem is we don’t know how deep a deficit we’re in,” he explained. “We know for sure we’re at least $12-million but I think it’s more than that. So it will be our goal that we’re working towards, but we’ll certainly balance it in our first mandate.”
PC leader Jamie Baillie said the other parties have a spending agenda and he stuck to his guns that cutting administration costs and putting the savings into the pockets of Nova Scotians is the way to go.
“To me, those two very different ways of creating jobs in the future is what tonight was all about and what the election is going to be about,” he argued. “Consolidate the health boards, consolidate the school boards, and let the civil service contract by ten per cent through attrition. That money which is less than two per cent of the overall budget is then handed back to Nova Scotians so that jobs can be created that way.”
He also continued to argue huge MLA pension packages should be scraped.
