This returns me to the position of the fact that this port authority is not running a port, so why are you giving it borrowing power? What does it need to finance that's so critical and necessary to the infrastructure, fiscal or transportation or otherwise, of the Government of Canada? Why do you need to allow this facility to borrow money? One of the reasons it does borrow money is to keep itself afloat. This is a port authority that has proved adept at doing one thing very well, and that's lose money.
So they had some land holdings, some residual land holdings from when it used to be the Toronto Harbour Commission, before it was taken away from the City of Toronto.
You speak to the fact that they're not supposed to build condominiums, but the reality is that the port authorities in the past have been very engaged in facilitating that kind of construction, but they're not engaged in waterfront activity.
We've been trying for a year and a half to get them to fix the two shipping channels that enter the harbour of Toronto. They won't do it. Part of the problem is they have no money to do it, but part of the problem is they refuse to take jurisdiction over the issue. Conveniently, when the letters patent were drafted for the port authority, they removed the harbour from the jurisdiction of the port authority. What they left it with was a couple of ferry docks and a couple of shipping channels, but they only have jurisdictional control over the navigation of those channels. They don't actually have control of the maintenance of those channels. Why would you do that? I don't get it.
In creating capacity for this body, which is accountable to nobody but the minister, its public meetings are defined by 15 minutes of questions with someone who basically directs them towards port authority lobbyists. They spend more money on lawyers and lobbyists than they do on shipping. So in giving them the ability to borrow, I would assume for capital and capital only investments, one would have to ask, what's the long-term strategy on the waterfront? They don't have one. What's their interaction with the port? Beyond the three private shippers that move salt, sugar, and sand into the city, there is no relationship. The one thing they've built on the waterfront, for about $10 million, was a ferry dock that had no service to it for transportation, was not built in the inner harbour, where people use the inner harbour, and was built after the ferry it was built to serve essentially went bankrupt.
The only thing that remains, beyond the website with the non-existent ferry, are signs on the highway to a non-existent ferry dock. It's a calamity. It's a disaster. Why the new government would even think of appointing people to this body rather than dissolve it is beyond me. But giving it the ability to borrow money and to give it access to a pool of capital, which, as we know, is scarce and growing scarcer here in Ottawa, and to rob that capital from places like Montreal, which is striving to build a real port and move real cargo, or from Prince Rupert and the deepwater ports on the west coast, which are a fundamental part of the resource and agricultural sectors of the prairies, to take that money away from those industries and to make it accessible to a bunch of yahoos down on the waterfront in Toronto, I don't get it. I just don't get it.
We have bridge problems getting cargo back and forth across the U.S. border. Are we building more bridges? No.