The federal NDP has been busy in recent weeks nominating candidates in the province and releasing platform planks.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair was also in Saskatoon Friday to visit a local daycare and attend a party function in the evening.
Even though a federal election is still likely a year away, the NDP has already made a number of platform commitments including a national childcare plan and federal minimum wage.
Mulcair does not mince words when he says this a direct shot at Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau who he says has failed to reveal where his party stands on key issues.
“They are looking at the Liberal leader and saying, ‘Well, does he have any ideas,’” he says. “He hasn’t said anything on any of these key subjects and frankly whenever he does talk about things like international affairs, again, it just leaves people scratching their heads saying, ‘Why did he say that his favourite country is China because it’s a dictatorship.’”
Another of the NDP’s platform planks is a pledge to call a national inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal women within 100 days of taking office.
Mulcair says this is an issue the party takes very seriously and one the Harper government has failed to act on.
“You can just imagine that if one of Canada’s large cities with a population that would be similar to the population of the Aboriginal community in Canada, if you had 1,200 murdered and missing women, you wouldn’t have to get on bended knee to beg for an inquiry, one would have been launched a long time ago. So, we think that this is a sign of racism, frankly, and a failure to understand that this is deserving of a full national inquiry.”
The Conservatives tried earlier this year to revamp on-reserve education with the First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act but the legislation now sits in limbo after failing to gain the necessary stakeholder support.
The NDP leader says, if elected, his party would take a different approach to First Nations education including immediately addressing the funding gap between on and off-reserve students.
The NDP has not held a federal seat in Saskatchewan since 2004.