Mulcair slams Harper and Trudeau while in London

New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Tom Mulcair held a rally at the London Convention Centre while on a six city Southwestern Ontario campaign trail called the “Whistle-Stop Harper Tour”.

He delivered a charismatic and impassioned speech to a large crowd on Sunday, Oct. 4 who chanted in support of the party while flaunting orange stop signs that read “STOP HARPER”. The speech focused on Mulcair’s plan to create jobs as well as the failure of other parties to do so, featuring frank criticisms of Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

London NDP candidate German Gutierrez as well as Debbie Mulcair, one of Tom Mulcair’s six sisters, opened the ceremony with brief, but enthusiastic endorsements for the NDP leader before welcoming him to the stage as “the next Prime Minister of Canada” to an explosion of applause.

A beaming Mulcair made his way through the audience, stopping often to shake hands until finally opening his speech with a warm “good afternoon London”.

Tom Mulcair began criticizing Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party of Canada’s “politics of fear and division” almost immediately.

“Do you want to help me get rid of Stephen Harper?” Mulcair asked, assuring that his party has “the plan to start repairing the damage Stephen Harper has been doing for the past decade”.

Mulcair asserted that Harper was responsible for the termination of 400,000 manufacturing jobs by giving $5 million in taxpayer’s money to the company Electro-Motive Diesel, which subsequently moved its operations to the United States.

He accused Harper of outright selfishness when he said, “He doesn’t seem to care…what he’s hoping to do right in the middle of an election campaign [is] come up with something that will help his fortunes.”

He also criticized Harper for cutting funding for home mail delivery and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), and for causing Canada to be “the only country in the world to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol”. The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty to lower greenhouse gases emissions in an attempt to fight global warming.

Even the Liberal Party of Canada was not safe from the condemnation of Mulcair, who accused Liberal leader Justin Trudeau of practicing “Harperism” and declared that Liberals “master the art of dividing Canadians one against the other”.

He criticized Trudeau’s support of Harper’s trade deal, Bill C-51, several of Harper’s budgets and his decision to give corporations $50 billion in tax breaks.

“For the first time in Canadian history, there’s hope,” Mulcair said. He pledged to establish the “quality affordable childcare” services that Trudeau and Harper have been resisting.

Mulcair appealed to “hundreds of dairy farms in the greater London area” by promising to maintain a supply management system allowing farm owners to stay employed during an economic downturn.

He also vowed to bring back home mail delivery, to restore the age of retirement from 67 back to 65, to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, to help families, first nations people and seniors in poverty and to “champion manufacturing and innovation” in order to generate jobs.

At the end of his speech, Mulcair left the London Convention Centre in the same fashion he entered: wading through a crowd of impassioned supporters with a warm-hearted smile while somehow still managing to shake hands, make eye contact and share a few words with rally attendees. Mulcair delivered a convincing speech Oct. 4, which successfully inspired an atmosphere of triumph and compassion in his London supporters.