• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Conservatives promise to up defense budget

Posted on: Monday, 16 January 2006, 17:15 CST

By Randall Palmer

SAINT JOHN, New Brunswick (Reuters) - The man likely to be elected the new prime minister in a week's time, Conservative leader Stephen Harper, said on Monday he wants to boost defense spending enough for the world to take notice.

"I've made no secret of our desire to rebuild the Canadian military to have the capacities of a sovereign nation," Harper told supporters on a campaign swing through Atlantic Canada. "To make foreign policy decisions that are not only independent but are actually noticed by other powers around the world."

With just a week until next Monday's election, Harper's Conservatives are enjoying a lead of eight to 13 percentage points in the polls over the Liberals, who have been in power since 1993. That margin puts them on the verge of winning a majority in Parliament.

The Liberals of Prime Minister Paul Martin have been hit hard by scandals, an ill-starred campaign and voter fatigue.

Martin was upbeat on Monday, predicting in a speech in Vancouver: "We're going to win the election." But minutes later, Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh became the latest member of the government to admit the Liberals have a big challenge.

"There's no denying that there is this view in some quarters of the country that they're looking for change," he told reporters. "There's no question that we have a gap to make up. There's a lot of fight left in us yet."

Harper's remarks on defense appeared partly to be in response to frequent criticism from Martin that Conservative policies would damage the country at home and abroad.

Harper said his commitments had all been detailed, dollar by dollar. "I'll only make promises I know we can afford and we can keep," he said.

Martin, who was finance minister in the 1990s, eliminated the country's chronic budget deficits, partly through cutting defense spending to levels that were criticized by NATO and the United States.

He charges that Harper's plans would leave a C$22 billion ($19.5 billion) hole in the federal budget, which would require major spending cuts.

"It is easy to make 196 promises but it is much harder to make a choice, to choose between one program and another, one service and another. I know this because I've been there," he said in his Vancouver speech.

"To me, (Harper's plan) sounds very much like the kind of thinking we did away with 13 years ago when we decided it was time to turn our country around."

Conservative strategists are watching to see if their lead in the polls will start eroding as it did in the 2004 campaign, when they were ahead by a smaller margin and ended up losing to Martin, despite a corruption scandal that weakened the Liberals.

An SES/CPAC poll on Monday showed an eight-point lead, unchanged from Sunday, while two others showed a widening gap. Strategic Counsel put the Conservatives ahead by 40 to 27 percent, and Ekos had them at 38.6 percent support to 27.2 percent.

Harper, 46, is trying to walk a fine line between being upbeat and sounding too confident, thereby risking scaring away voters leery of his party taking majority power.

He has been particularly keen in the past several days to point to momentum in Quebec, where the Conservatives have displaced the Liberals and are now second in the polls to the Bloc Quebecois, which wants an independent Quebec.

"We are gaining support in every region of the country, and we are pulling votes away from both the Liberals and the Bloc. That's good for Quebec and that's good for Canada," he said.

(Additional reporting by David Ljunggren in Vancouver)

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category