I just heard an intervention by a Liberal member. Are the Liberals listening while I am making this point? My point is the exact opposite. They are not listening. They ignored two or three common sense suggestions which would improve the bill. They are playing political partisanship games, hoping to come up with a bill and take all the credit for it after asking all stakeholders to participate. The parliamentary secretary thanked everyone who participated, even members of the opposition.
In the legislation I see danger down the road. There is no comprehensive dispute settlement mechanism. That is the same thing that is wrong with NAFTA. The government seems to shy away from making things simple and clear in the future. It wants to continue to confuse matters so that people have to hire lawyers to settle their problems.
This is a sign of an incompetent minister who does not take the time to review the bill before it is sent off to committee for debate where many amendments have to be made to make it better. It is the same as what the Minister of Justice did lately by trying to tag on to the Reform notion of victims rights. He tried to claim it as his own and tried to take credit for it. Lately he has been saying that he has made amendments to section 745 to make things better for citizens but has failed to address the real problem.
The last two justice bills we have debated were just admissions of failure. The Minister of Justice should be trained to read every clause and go through it clause by clause. When people are trained as lawyers they become much better at it than individuals like myself who are businessmen. We rely on lawyers to do this for us. We rely on them to look at.
There was supposed to be an immediate impact statement but in comes another bill that defers the impact statement to the year 2012. It is the same individual and the same department. That is incompetence.
I am not talking about the quality or the intent of the bill. Its intent is good but the quality of work comes under criticism which I am trying to do in a constructive fashion. We waste everybody's time when we play political partisanship, when we do not listen to the people we asked for input, and when we come up with garbage that has to be rewritten five different ways.
I am not talking about dotting an i or crossing a t . I am talking about common sense amendments which should be obvious. If they want a bill that states immediate impact statements should be allowed, why do they put in an amendment that states they are not allowed until the year 2012? What is the message being sent? If they make an amendment respecting the ports police that will put people out of work, some consideration should be given to them and they are ignored. That is not competent work.
With all the amendments put forward a better job of debating them could have been done in committee. It did not need to come back to the House. I do not think many MPs knew what they were voting on in all the votes we took. I sat here and relied on our critic
or others who had looked into the matter on my behalf to say that it fit with our party policy and is something we can support.
That is a disservice to the members of the House. We do not have the time to listen to stuff like this coming back from committees with 65 amendments and try to get our heads around them. We are making it harder for MPs to do their job better.
The Liberals presented the bill. During debate and in the intervention of the parliamentary secretary for the transport minister, the member from Hamilton indicated that he liked the port authority and the way a crown corporation could be co-ordinated with the private sector because, he said, "taxpayers will not be on the hook". I agree with that intent. I fully endorse that objective.
Let us look at the Department of Transport. Did it apply the same philosophy when it looked at Pearson airport and cancelled the contract? That can be called an airport authority. We are moving toward airport authorities. There is an airport authority there now. We set up a marine port authority. We now have an airport authority that will have directors. It will be not for profit. It will reinvest money and improve things there.
Was the department's decision on Pearson done with the idea that taxpayers would not be on the hook? That is what was said at first and a lot of taxpayers believed it. In fact a lot of people voted for the government because they felt privatization of the airport would lead to huge profits for the private sector.
I did not have a clue. I would not have known whether or not that was true. Somebody seemed to know. The current Prime Minister was in opposition then. He must have had some information when he said private developers were greedy sons-of-guns that would sock it to us and charge us hundreds of millions of dollars. Therefore he could not let the deal go through. What happened? It was cancelled. They sued for damages, which the government was willing to give. Then they sued for profits. They cannot sue for profits. How can they tell what the profits are? That was dumb.
The Department of Transport fought them a bit too much. Then what happened? A year went by and we found out when they got to the discovery stage and everybody was filing their information that the government's defence was that it could not be sued for profits because it had looked into the deal and those guys would have lost money on it. Which is it? It cancels the deal because they would have made too much money and then defends itself by saying they would have lost money.
Guess what it cost taxpayers. The parliamentary secretary used the Marine Port Authority as an endorsement on how good the bill is. Taxpayers were not be on the hook. We might be because of the ambiguity in terms of the disputes in the bill. Let us say they are not as serious or will not cost as much as the Pearson airport. Who knows?
Pearson airport cost $60 million off the top for withdrawing the lawsuit. Somehow or another somebody got enough money. I would like to know how the airport authority will come up with $700 million, how that money will be granted and how much of it will be a loan from the federal government somewhere down the line. We do not know the details. Pearson airport has already cost taxpayers about $200 million. Am I right?