Rob Nicholson

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I do agree with the member on one thing. He is right when he says that this is about Conservative values. A Conservative value is doing what is right for Canadians and standing up for Canadians. That has been a Conservative tradition in this country since Confederation.

He talks about ownership and, yes, that is what we are talking about. We are talking about the deprivation of ownership of all those people who owned that land. If the member was listening to my comments, I said that this right to own property was something that touches Canadians and all human beings very deeply. The member should ask the people in his riding, who came from eastern Europe, what it was like to live under a communist regime. Yes, there was public ownership but when their lands, their farms and their homes were expropriated by communist authorities, ask them what ownership was. If he tells them that it was public ownership where they came from, the people will tell him that their lands and their homes were stolen and they do not want to hear him talk about public ownership.

The worst part about this is that those people who had their land expropriated knew that the land was not necessary. When the Constitution was amended it should have put in provisions with respect to property rights, so individuals who have had their land taken away by the Crown or some public authority would have a remedy, that they would be able to challenge that if in fact it was proven that the land was not necessary. However, 97,000 acres were taken. Heathrow airport only has 2,700 acres and here we are talking about 97,000 acres. That would be the most incredibly sized airport in the world.

When there were problems with it, everybody was to blame except the Liberals. Every aspect, every cost overrun and every passenger who did not use the airport were to blame. It was never the government.

It is about ownership and I think he should get behind this Conservative motion. He says that it is in the past. Wrongs in the past should be addressed, not swept under the carpet. The member can check the record on this but his party has been consistent for 30 years in not wanting to talk about this but that is wrong. It was wrong in the 1970s when they took this land from these people, and in 2004 it is still wrong.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

They wanted to do anything, anything at all, and when the move was made to offer the land back to the people who had owned it, they tracked it to see if there were any mistakes. But the mistake they never lived up to was the mistake that was made by them. That was the one they never wanted to acknowledge.

This story is not at an end. This motion is brought forward by the Leader of the Opposition and I and my colleagues are pleased to support it and pleased to have the support of other members in the House. It should have the support of the members of the Liberal Party.

They do not have to apologize for the mistakes of former Liberal prime ministers. Do what is right, that is what I say to people. They should do what is right and the Liberal members know what is right. Quite apart from the fact that they do not want to talk about it, they know deep down that what they did was a terrible mistake.

The job is not yet completed. There is plenty of land for Mirabel airport for the foreseeable future and the land that we are proposing be given back to the rightful owners to correct those mistakes is well within the purview of this government, but this mistake is just part of the arrogance with which the government has always treated property owners.

I remember speaking about this issue in 1988 in the House of Commons. I also raised the matter that is still with us about the St. Lawrence Seaway. There were expropriated lands in the Niagara Peninsula to twin the canals.

Have you heard that proposal lately, Mr. Speaker? Is anyone going to twin the Welland Canal? I asked the Minister of Transport if there were any plans for it. I will tell the House what the Liberals will tell us. They will say, “Well, we expropriated the land, there is no plan whatsoever, but it is always for the foreseeable future”.

The people who suffered because their lands were expropriated, like the people at Mirabel, just have to live with that. The Minister of Transport says it is the public interest, but what about those people's interests? They are Canadians too and they deserve to have their interests heard in this chamber, but again what the minister would say is that it was turned over to a crown corporation and “what can we do about that?”

The Liberals create these crown corporations and then nothing can be done. They have been the government, for heaven's sake, for 80 out of the last 100 years. They could correct all these mistakes if they put a mind to it, but they will not. They will not correct those mistakes. Why? Because they have to look at their own past and look within themselves to correct a mistake they made. That is a pattern and it is a pattern that I have seen throughout my life.

I remember about a year ago when there were D-Day celebrations and it was revealed that the Liberals were going to send 60 veterans and 70 bureaucrats. Do members remember that one? The government changed its mind, but what was fascinating to me was that the Liberals changed their minds because they had to be shamed into doing it. It is always the same: never do what is right because it is right to do it, do it because one has been shamed into it. Yes, in the end the government helped out Canadian veterans and sent some more. The Liberals had no choice. The spotlight was on them.

It is like the mess of the sponsorship scandal. When the light is on the Liberals, what are they going to say? They say they are going to repent. The Prime Minister was as mad as hell and was going to fix up things here. Yes, he was going to fix up things because everybody knew about it then, but that is always the way and that certainly is the way for the people of Mirabel.

I hope the people who had that land expropriated are following this along with the people who had land expropriated that would never be needed for the St. Lawrence Seaway. I hope all people who have been victimized by governments will have a look at this and follow the debate. What they will find is the same thing that took place in the 1980s. Every time the subject has ever been raised the government does not want to talk about it. They will talk about anything else, about 100 different issues, about the price of coffee, they will say, let us talk about that. It is Mirabel, we will say, but they will want to do something else.

It is a shameful part of the Trudeau legacy but I say to those members that they do not have to be stuck with it. They should do the right thing. Let us join together. This is a minority Parliament. The Minister of Transport has said to me on a number of occasions that he is flexible and wants to work with people, so let him work with all of us here.

He does not want to talk about those 11,000 people. He says that there are procedural difficulties and that there are contracts. There is a man on the moon. There is always something holding them up. I say that he should do the right thing and Canadians will thank him.

I hope the members of the Liberal Party get on their feet and say, “Yes, this is a minority Parliament. We want to work together. It was a mistake from a long time ago. We can admit that mistake. Let us move on and do something for these people because that is what is right”.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

He says we were in government. I can say that when moves were made to rectify this, it was the members of his party who would not. We can check Hansard and find out--

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

The minister says it was public interest. What about the interests of those 12,000 people? That is what I ask him. What about their interests? Who was worried about them? Certainly not the government of the time.

I remember when the move was made in the 1980s to try to rectify this. Let us guess who was up on their feet in the House of Commons fighting it every step of the way. It was the members of the Liberal Party. We would have to have seen the debates to believe it. They threw up every roadblock and every argument about getting into that area. Why? Because they had to confront the mistakes of their own past. That was what the problem was.

That is what the problem is today. They do not want to talk about it. I listened to the Minister of Transport and I am sure we will hear other members of the government. They want to talk about everything, everything else except the thousands of people who lost their property.

They do not want to talk about all those individuals who might get their properties back today because they do not want to have to confront that. If one asks members of the Liberal Party about the expropriation at Mirabel, they will want to talk about the price of coffee in Mexico or they will reach in their pockets and want to show pictures of their grandchildren, anything to get off the subject of those thousands of people who lost their properties.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

The transport minister says it was the NDP. That is quite correct. The NDP did not want property rights in at the time but that does not absolve the government of the time. The Progressive Conservatives were in support of it and the federal Liberals should have gone ahead with it but they did not.

Nonetheless, people wherever they come from in the world always tell me the same thing. Many of those individuals have come from communist countries. We can talk about the blight of communism. We can talk about how communism ruined every economy in which it took hold and how one of the things that is consistent about people from that was their loss of private property. It touches people deeply.

Indeed, we do not have to come from a communist country. I remember a colleague of mine, a man by the name of Kevin Mulvey, whom I went to school with at the University of Windsor and who told me that when he graduated from Windsor he bought a home in the Windsor area. I congratulated him on that. He told me he believed that he was the first member of his family to ever own land. He was an emigrant from England and his family had never owned land. This was something that touched him very deeply.

Indeed, my own ancestors came from Scotland as a result of property problems. Members may be aware of something in history known as the Highland clearances in the 1800s, in which Scottish citizens, including members of my own family, were evicted. They had lived there since the beginning of recorded time, but through government policy or government complicity they were evicted in the 1850s and they immigrated to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Over the years I have been in touch with many generations of my own family as I knew them. We have never received an apology for that. Nonetheless they came to other countries and indeed they have tried, but that is what drove them out of Scotland.

Indeed, when I was there on my honeymoon I could not help but reflect on that when we drove through the empty valleys. I wondered if anyone had any second thoughts about clearing out the population of the Highlands in Scotland.

Nonetheless this is something that is very deep in all human beings. I thought about those thousands of people who were evicted from their expropriated land. We saw the heartbreak and the heartache that accompanied it. It seems to me that there are many Canadians who could identify with this.

For some of those individuals, it is not even as if today the Government of Canada was going to expropriate the city of Niagara Falls. I have lived in my home for 16 years. I could live with it. If my home was taken away, I could go somewhere else although I would never want to leave the area of Niagara Falls, Fort Erie and Niagara-on-the-Lake.

It seems to me that the people who were the victims of this aspect of the Trudeau legacy were not people who just lived there or had just moved into the neighbourhood. These people and their ancestors had been there for over 300 years. Talk about deep roots in an area: for over 300 years those individuals and their families had lived there and raised their children and these were the individuals who found out on an afternoon on the radio that their land was going to be expropriated for the new Mirabel airport.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Here is what I say to them. They can have their coffee klatch, get a few people together, keep dialling up the phones and vote for Mr. Trudeau. I do not have a problem with that. They should go ahead on that. It is not going to change the facts of this country or how this country was put together, but one does not have to be blinded by the fact that huge mistakes were made, and this was one of the biggest ones.

The mistake was those 10,000 to 12,000 people who were displaced, the people who had their property ownership taken away. I first became involved with this as an observer before I became a member of Parliament. Later, when I became a member of Parliament, when this issue was raised the part that touched me most deeply was the people whose properties were being arbitrarily taken away by the government. I believe that property rights are something that touches Canadians. I think that touches all human beings very deeply.

In my years of living in Niagara Falls and representing that area, one of the things that has impressed me is that people who have come to this country from other parts of the world invariably tell me many things but one of the things that is very consistent about people who have come to this country is their love of private property. Quite frankly, I was disappointed that when the Constitution of this country was amended there were not some provisions for property rights--

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

They are never at fault. They spoke with one voice all those years.

When there was trouble getting airlines to locate at Mirabel, the airlines were to blame. If there were passengers who did not want to use the airport for whatever reason, it was the passengers who were to blame. There was always somebody else to blame except themselves. This has been a pattern within the Liberal Party. I guess Liberals feel it is their duty, which I do not quite understand, to defend everything in the Trudeau legacy. I do not really understand it.

The greatest Canadian who ever lived was Sir John A. Macdonald. There is no question about that--

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to rise on this motion by the Conservative Party, which asks that the 11,000 unused acres of land outside the perimeter of Mirabel airport be returned and made available to the farmers and individuals who owned this property.

There are a couple of reasons why I am very pleased that my party has brought forward this motion. One of them is that it puts a spotlight on one of the sorriest chapters of the Trudeau legacy in this country.

In the early 1970s the government made an announcement that it was going to expropriate approximately 97,000 acres of land for a new airport in Montreal. To put this in perspective, it is as if the people in my riding of Niagara Falls on their way home this afternoon heard that the Government of Canada was going to expropriate the Town of Fort Erie, all of the City of Niagara Falls and displace every resident in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Those are the proportions that we are talking about.

To put further into context the 97,000 acres of land, Heathrow Airport, which I believe may be the busiest airport in the world, has 2,700 acres of land, Los Angeles has 3,500, and Toronto has 4,200. Even with this motion, another 1,000 acres are available to Mirabel airport over and above that which is allocated to Toronto, despite the fact that passenger service now is discontinued at Mirabel airport and we have no idea from the government when it is going to reopen again, although we hear it will be some time in the future.

Nonetheless, that is not what we are talking about. We are not talking about those 5,200 acres. We are talking about the 11,000 acres that are unused and unneeded. That is what we are talking about. I believe it was one of the saddest chapters in the Trudeau legacy. I put it to the Minister of Transport and his friend, the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, what is in it for them to defend what so clearly was a mistake on behalf of their party? Neither of them were ministers in Mr. Trudeau's government. They were ministers under subsequent Liberal prime ministers. What is it about them and their colleagues that they cannot admit this obvious mistake?

The mistakes were compounded at that particular site. They grew and grew and never once did the government ever take responsibility for it when there were hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cost overruns. Members may remember what the government said. It said it was the contractors who were to blame. The local authorities were to blame. At one point the Province of Quebec was to blame. Everybody was to blame except the federal Liberals.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, that was an interesting exchange between the leader of the official opposition and the Minister of Transport. The Minister of Transport, quite correctly, pointed out that he was a member and not a minister in the Trudeau government. He was a minister in the government of Mr. Turner.

Why does the Minister of Transport feel that he is under an obligation to defend the Trudeau legacy? He was not a minister during that period of time. He knows in his heart that a terrible mistake was made in the late sixties and the early seventies when 10,000 people were dispossessed of their property. He was not a minister in that government so what is in it for him? He does not have to answer for them. We heard it from him and we heard it from the member for Glengarry--Prescott--Russell.

Those members cannot divorce themselves from the mistakes of the past but they know in their hearts that those mistakes were made, which is why they do not want to talk about anything else. If we were to check the record of those members we would see that over the years they have talked about everything except the 10,000 people who lost their land, and they still do not want to talk about that today. They want to talk about everything else under the sun except those human tragedies.

I would like to hear the member address that. I have not heard him yet but I have heard him talk about everything else. He told us to talk to the cargo handlers and the companies who want to use Mirabel. I say that he should talk to the farmers who lost their land. What are they going to do about them? That is what the minister should be talking about.

[Air Transportation Security, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, last week we learned that the Liberal government made a $234 million profit taxing air travellers for security. At the same time we know that Transport Canada charged our airports $256 million for rent. This is outrageous. This hurts airports. It hurts airlines. It is bad for business and it is bad for tourism. The worst part is that the Canadian air traveller has to pick up the tab for everything.

When are the Liberals going to learn that every service is not an opportunity for the Liberal government to make money? When will they stop gouging taxpayers and reduce airport rents?