UPDATED — Sept. 13, 9:55 a.m.
Arriving in Greater Sudbury this past weekend after a cancelled visit earlier this summer, federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was quick to note he was at Sudbury's Jazz festival for the music.
“(The jazz festival) was great,” Ignatieff said, speaking to reporters as he was leaving the event Sept. 11. “The best news is I did not have to sing or play an instrument myself. The audience was happy about that.”
“The community was out,” he noted. “It was a great initiative. They should be very proud of this festival. It is in it's second year. It grows and grows.”
Ignatieff said while the federal government can be supportive of arts and cultural events like the festival he was attending, it was the community itself that needs to rally.
“Festivals in other parts of the country are just enormous now,” he said. “Sudbury should watch places like Toronto and Montreal and get really big and ambitious with their festivals here.”
Federal Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff dropped by the Jazz Sudbury Festival at Science North on Sept. 11. He said he enjoyed the music and meeting participants. Photo by Bill Bradley.
Even though he said he was there for the music, Ignatieff did speak to the media about the long-gun registry debate.
“I'm glad here in northern Ontario (NDP MPs Claude Gravelle and Glenn Thibeault) have seen sense,” he said, referring to the two MPs' recent change of stance on the long-gun registry.
“We need to sustain a gun registry because the police need it. They have said so. They need the long-gun registry for public safety.”
Ignatieff said he and the rest of the Liberal caucus have been fighting for the continued existence of the gun registry for the last nine months.
“We have a crazy situation where...some of the NDP and (Prime Minister) Harper are on one side and the police on the other side.”
But he did note there were issues with the registry that needed to be addressed to eliminate the urban and rural divide.
“We take out the fees,” he suggested. “We simplify the forms. We make it as easy as possible. We stop this business of dividing northern and southern and urban and rural Canada.”
The Liberal leader began his Sudbury visit Sept. 11 after arriving on the Liberal Express earlier in the day.
He attended a corn roast in Sturgeon Falls, before heading to Warren, and then the jazz festival. Ignatieff has been touring Canada on the Liberal Express, but will stop when Parliament resumes in a week.
His earlier planned visits to Sudbury were scrapped after Mario Laguë, a member of Ignatieff's political team, died in a motorcycle accident.
