VANCOUVER - Insisting that he still wants to make Parliament work, newly crowned Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff said Sunday he plans to have his party’s election platform ready next month.

But the Liberals won’t wait even that long before offering concrete reforms to employment insurance starting with a proposal for a “temporary” minimum standard of 360 hours of work in order to draw EI benefits.

“This is an urgent measure,” Ignatieff said as the Liberals ended their biennial policy convention. “We’ve got 54 different regional rates of eligibility across the country. We think that a national standard … that would come into force while the [economic] crisis lasts, would be in the national interest.”

Even after the recession ends, standards should be harmonized across the country, he said. “It strikes Canadians as unfair that if you pay into the thing, your eligibility depends on where you live.”

The day after delivering a leadership acceptance speech vague on details of where he would take the country, Ignatieff was at pains to explain some of the broad directions of the emerging Liberal platform.

For instance, he flatly rejected the idea of a carbon tax, even though a resolution calling for one was passed with little debate by convention delegates.

“We’ve said very clearly we want a continental ‘cap and trade,’ ” he said.

“We will not be going into the next election with a carbon tax.”

A cap and trade system sets a ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions by industries, which can trade their carbon quotas among themselves.

Ignatieff said the party platform won’t necessarily be unveiled in June. “Don’t derive electoral timetables from that.”

However, June is when the government’s next economic update to Parliament is due and some Liberals, including former prime minister Jean Chretien, have urged the party to try for an election as soon as possible.

The new leader, perhaps taking a page from Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society” vision, said he wants Canada to become a “knowledge society” and his platform will reflect that thinking, with proposals in early childhood learning, technology and research, aboriginal and post-secondary education and “lifelong” learning.

Ignatieff said his vision and the measures that flow from it would transform the country into a knowledge society by 2017 – Canada’s 150th birthday.

In contrast, he said Stephen Harper is running a “visionless and directionless government more preoccupied with its own survival than giving Canadians for the future.”

Follow Christina Spencer's blog on the Liberal Convention