Unfortunately the hon. member opposite would sooner spend his time, as he said he did, back in his riding holding what he called politically oriented meetings, et cetera, rather than doing the job that his constituents sent him here to Ottawa to do.
We were working very hard on a triple T study, as we call it, a trade, transportation and tourism study. We heard a bevy of witnesses on the subject.
To the credit of the chairman of that committee, he pulled together 22 players, who either came to the committee at one time or made written interventions to the committee, to sit at one table. It worked wonderfully. Unfortunately, the hon. member missed it. Not one member of the Reform Party was present. However, the government and the official opposition were there.
Twenty-two people were sitting around the table. Instead of the usual way a committee works, hearing witness after another, unconnected, and only hearing one side of the story, we had all these witnesses sitting around the table discussing the idea of finding new options, exploring new ways of helping to finance a national highways project. One person would say something and another person would argue sensibly, quietly and diligently why we may not be able to do something.
It was the most fruitful meeting I have been at in the nine years I have been sitting on committees. There was interaction at the table between the private sector, the public sector and members of Parliament who represent their constituencies. At the end of the day, there was a consensus among all the players. Even more important than pulling in witnesses and trying to come to some consensus as individual witnesses, it was a table that came together as a consensus. It was marvellous.
The consensus was to move toward a model. We would take an example of a structured road somewhere in Canada and apply the strategic thinking that went on at that committee to the model to see how to crunch the numbers, to see the options of payment, and to see where the government and the Canadian taxpayers would be taking a lower risk on a particular venture. These are the great ideas that came out of that meeting. Unfortunately, the member opposite was not at it.
On the subject of the Pearson airport deal, I have to ask myself about the hon. member of the Reform Party. Let us remind ourselves that he belongs to a party that prides itself on being the party of constituent consensus. Let us look at constituent consensus. What did constituency consensus state? In the Toronto Star , for example, on December 4, 1993, it stated: ``Prime Minister's Chrétien's decision to cancel the privatization deal of Pearson International Airport is a breath of fresh air that cleans the stench left behind by the shady deal worked out by the Tory lobbyists for friends of the previous government''.
"Friends of the previous government". After hearing the intervention of the Reform Party member opposite, I have to think that he could not be a friend of the taxpayers. He is a friend of these lobbyists, of the company run by a guy by the name of Don Matthews, a gentleman who was a chief Tory fundraiser and past president of the Conservative Party. He came forward with this deal. There is not even an option or opportunity for the not for profit corporation, the GTAA, Greater Toronto Airport Authority, to get into the bidding process. It was not allowed to bid on the project and the deal went to Paxport.
At the end of the day Paxport, the company that won the deal, did not have the resources to follow through with what it wanted to do. What did it have to do? It had to reach out and pull in someone in order to meet the deal that it had promised the Conservatives. Therefore, it reached out to the owners of terminal 3, Claridge.