Stephen Harper

[Citizenship and Immigration, November 25th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, the immigration minister is now trying to claim she is against the government's exotic dancer program. She claims the government should not be in the business of supplying Canada's strip clubs. Yet the same minister sent her right-hand man to such a club to facilitate the importation of women to work there.

Can the minister explain this breathtaking hypocrisy to Canadians?

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, Mr. Mulroney and his government undertook the steps that were possible to take to rectify this problem in that era. They signed an agreement which the facts show has not been fulfilled and not upheld. I suggest, and I think the House is going to suggest, the minister look at renegotiating this. The grounds are there. Justice demands it. The minister refuses.

This particular minister must face facts and rectify this situation. This minister has accomplished a new record in Canadian politics. He has been a minister under Trudeau at the far centralist end, then under Turner at the far centralist end of the spectrum, and co-founder of the Bloc. Yet, through 20 years of his political career, in all these different incarnations, he still manages to be wrong all of the time.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

The minister talks about the lease. This lease includes the objective of encouraging passenger air traffic to Mirabel. Obviously, this objective has so far not been reached. ADM has to be realistic and treat Canadians fairly in this case.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member of the Bloc Québécois for his comments.

We hope that all members of this House will support this motion. We might not have support from the Liberals who, up to this day, continue to live in the arrogant Trudeau era. Nonetheless, I hope we will pass this motion.

It is the responsibility of the government to find a way to return the expropriated land. It is not an easy issue. ADM has its own view, but it is a creature of the government.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

Madam Speaker, I am glad to answer this question. For us, the issue is not the process of a government agency, but justice for all citizens of this region and for farmers.

I want all Canadians to understand this situation. The former minister talks about a bunch of issues that frankly, for the most part, are irrelevant to what is before us today.

The record is this. The Liberal government expropriated 97,000 acres, of which only 5,000 is being used today and, by the way, not being used completely, as we all know. Mirabel is the Liberal white elephant of history. Some day it will be in history books for future generations. Some day when we have interplanetary travel, it may be a story in other galaxies.

The previous Conservative government in its day returned some 81,000 acres and made provision for the expansion. The expansion of Mirabel has not occurred. What is before us today? The Minister of Transport should drop his Trudeauist blinders for a minute, forget about that era, and move into the 21st century.

In the last 15 or 20 years it has become apparent that the issue at Mirabel is the survival of the existing facility. It is not the expansion of the facility. That is not going to happen any time in my lifetime. The people who owned this land and are using it want it back so they can make productive investment. Quite frankly, the issue here is simple. The member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, the former minister, and the current minister, quite frankly, should just admit they were wrong. Drop the Liberal arrogance and get on with the solution.

[Supply, November 25th, 2004]

moved:

That the House call on the government to take the appropriate measures to sell the 11,000 acres of arable land back to the families and farmers whose land was expropriated to build the Mirabel Airport.

Mr. Speaker, the issue to which we are drawing the attention of the House today will no doubt revive many bad memories for two generations of Quebeckers. It should also be of concern to all Canadians.

The savage expropriation that took place north of Montreal 25 years ago in Mirabel is not only a Quebec issue. All Canadians, especially rural Canadians, Canadian farmers, understand that a person's home or land is a sacred refuge where families grow, where livelihoods are made, where dreams are pursued and where a sense of community is developed.

This was a massive injustice, an odious boondoggle, which effects continue to this day for thousands of people. This is a story that has been understood, at least in part, for some time across the country.

I believe today we will hear from the hon. member for West Vancouver--Sunshine Coast--Sea to Sky Country who was here in the 1970s. He spoke about the injustice and the boondoggle, on a scale never before seen, taking place in Mirabel. In the 1980s the hon. member for Niagara Falls, who I believe will speak later today, spoke about the attempts of the then Mulroney Conservative government to rectify this injustice.

The fact of the matter is that in some form, 30 years later this continues without full resolution.

The Mirabel wound has never been healed, the outrage has never been repaired and the error has never been recognized.

My intention today is not to re-open the debate unnecessarily, since it is still open; quite the opposite. The goal of our motion is to ensure that the Government of Canada puts an end once and for all to a saga that dishonours our country and our government and reason of state.

On March 27, 1960, the Liberal government announced the construction of what it called one of the largest airports in the world, which would greet 10 million passengers a year.

To implement this totally unrealistic project, the Liberal government expropriated close to 100,000 acres of the best farm land in Quebec. The area is equivalent to two thirds of Montreal island.

To put it in western terms, this is an area almost the size of the city of Calgary.

One hundred thousand acres is twenty times the area currently occupied by Mirabel, an airport that is nearly always empty. The worst thing is not that this was a government mistake, all governments can make mistakes from time to time. The problem in this saga is that the government made mistake after mistake, with no consideration whatsoever for the families that have been in the area for generations.

For more than 15 years, from 1969 to 1985, a merciless battle has been waged against the Mirabel families by contemptuous public servants implementing an arrogant policy. The psychological harassment and constant war of nerves waged with such vehemence have just about brought many to their wits' end.

Since 1969, the situation of Mirabel landowners, the farmers in particular, has been difficult, unjust, humiliating and painful, dramatic, even, at times, to an extent we have trouble imagining today.

I recently visited that area and met with the leader of the remaining people who had been expropriated, Mr. Marcel Denis. I met with people who had lost their homes and their land. I can tell hon. members that for them there has been no closure to this traumatic event and no resolution to the future of their economic lives.

There is no better illustration of that arrogance than the way the people were notified that they would be pushed out of their homes. Mr. Raymond, the leader of the Mirabel expropriates, has described the first hours of the bomb that was dropped on the people of Mirabel in 1969.

This is an excerpt from La mémoire de Mirabel :

When I learned of the expropriation, I started tried to find out if it was really true or just a false rumour. Radio and newspaper reports had indicated that the new airport would be built in the Sainte-Scholastique area. Minister Marchand made the first announcement on the radio on March 27, 1969, at 2 or 3 p.m. That is how we found out.

So that is how they learned about the expropriation, on the radio. No consideration was shown them, their children, their friends, the families themselves that were going to be put out of their houses, none for the communities or local businesses. Mr. Raymond's story is worth keeping in mind as evidence of the Liberal way of doing things.

Right from that very first day up to the latest speech by the current Minister of Transport, the tone has remained strikingly similar. There was no consideration whatsoever shown to the families and citizens.

There are stories besides that of Mr. Raymond that deserve to be told, as they are indicative of the Liberal way and the inhuman nature of this undertaking. In this respect, Mr. Cardinal's case is very telling. At the time of the expropriation, Mr. Cardinal was getting on in years. He lived in the little village called Mirabel.

The federal government had planned to open up a quarry to provide the stone to make the concrete for the runways. In its wisdom, the Liberal government decided to put this quarry right in the little village of Mirabel.The people living within a one-mile radius of the quarry were forced out of their homes and had to move out very quickly, whether or not they had agreed to the amount of the expropriation. Here is his story:

In that area of the town there were around 35 homes and some 20 farms. A total of 50 or so buildings had to be abandoned to make room for the planned quarry.

Having been ordered to leave, Mr. Cardinal bought land in Saint-Eustache and had a new house built. Unfortunately for him, work on his new house was stopped by a strike and he did not have the time to finish moving his belongings.

When he finally went back to his old house to retrieve the rest of his belongings, government agents had set the house on fire and burnt it to the ground with everything that was left of his household and personal belongings still inside. Again I quote the book:

A life worth of things had stupidly disappeared. Mr. Cardinal took out his handkerchief--the house held many memories--and started crying. They climbed back into the truck and, without a word, drove back to Saint-Eustache.

Today, we know that the federal government made a mistake. Real quarries were dug two or three miles further on. The lands the expropriated owners had been forced to abandon were sold. Mr. Cardinal should never have been expropriated, let alone forced to leave his home. That is another chapter in the Liberal story of Mirabel.

There are tens and even hundreds of examples of the turpitude of the Liberal government. More recently, even the present Prime Minister's predecessor said that he would not shed a tear if Mirabel were to be closed.

These lands were never used for the airport. These people want to recover their lands. Recently, dozens of farmers, members of the 11,000 acres committee, demonstrated to express their anger in Mirabel. They even said they were ready to buy their lands back, and they should.

Mirabel was a terrible mistake. The mistake was not only to break up an area many times larger than necessary, but to victimize thousands of Quebeckers, treating them unfairly, and to deprive this airport of the tools it would have needed to develop and secure the future.

Now that the airport is entirely closed to passenger traffic and will not expand in the foreseeable future, if ever, the expropriated land owners believe that the 11,000 acres of land outside the airport perimeter should be returned to farming again.

The Minister of Transport says that it is not possible. Yet it was possible for the Conservative Mulroney government to give back about 80% of the lands to the expropriated owners. There are only 11,000 acres left to give back. This should not be too much for the Liberal government to do.

The Liberals would like this issue to go away but it will not and it will not be forgotten.

I looked at the plans of Mirabel on a recent visit there. One really has to see the map of this semi-abandoned airport to understand the scale of this scandal, this boondoggle, this mismanagement involving 97,000 acres of land.

It was not as if the Liberals were building the largest airport in the world. Sitting there half empty, Mirabel is already one of the largest airports in the world. It was as if they were building a space station, as if they were sending people to another galaxy out of that facility.

This is a mess that has been created by the Liberals. It is a mess that a previous Conservative government did in its time make some attempt to fix. It is a mess that must be fixed by the Liberals.

I urge all members, including the Trudeauist Minister of Transport, who was a member of the Trudeau government during the first phases of this saga, to support the resolution. It is not a matter of politics but rather a matter of goodwill and justice.

[Citizenship and Immigration, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I am in disbelief with an answer like that. I do not know how the minister thinks the goings on in her office are not her responsibility in the House. It is yet another non-answer to a question.

If her chief of staff is gone, if it was not good enough for him to wait for the report from the Ethics Commissioner, why should we wait for her report from the Ethics Commissioner? Should she not be gone as well?

[Citizenship and Immigration, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the government for that answer and I look forward to the government working with Secretary of State Powell and our other allies to ensure that this situation changes course and returns to democracy.

In the meantime, I am obliged to return to irregularities in Canada.

I want to ask the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration to confirm that she today dismissed her chief of staff, and, if that is true, to divulge to the House the full reasons for that dismissal.

[Ukraine, November 24th, 2004]

Mr. Speaker, millions of people are on the streets of Ukraine and elsewhere to protest irregularities in that country's elections. There is a real danger that these irregularities could result in an illegitimate regime in Kiev.

Is the government willing to tell Ukrainian Canadians and all Canadians that it is willing to take action and willing to send signals that it will withhold recognition or even assistance to ensure that after a century of struggle against Soviet communism, Ukraine will never again return to undemocratic rule?

[Citizenship and Immigration, November 23rd, 2004]

Actually, Mr. Speaker, the Deputy Prime Minister is wrong. This particular question that I just asked has not been raised with the Ethics Commissioner. It is that disclosing information files publicly is contrary to the Privacy Act.

Will the Deputy Prime Minister ask the minister to resign, or is the government incapable of acting while the Prime Minister trots around the globe?