Mr. Speaker, I have just a few words I would like to have on the record.
My experience in the House with the Minister of National Revenue would reflect the same as the member who just spoke: a very capable and a very hardworking member. I do not think we should leave on record the thought that there is any aspersion cast on that particular minister.
Having said that, there is aspersion all around. There is a saying that if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck in so far as it quacks, if you find it in your water and you see it in a group of other ducks, the chances are it may well be a duck. That is the underlying principle this motion tends to speak to.
We know full well, and those who have been in politics understand, that it is possible to promise much during an election campaign and deliver little or nothing after the election. The important thing is getting elected. Once you have been elected and if you have power then, as members opposite and the government have so ably shown in the distasteful handling of the GST promise, you can promise one thing and then do quite another and claim all kinds of reasons for doing this.
In the case of the Pearson airport deal, a deal was launched for well over a year. Whether we liked it or not, there were people involved from both political parties, the Liberals and the Tories, who had in good conscience come together to take over the Pearson airport.
This deal was signed by a Conservative Prime Minister. There are those around who feel that signing it during an election campaign, which I submit was very poor timing although the deal had been concluded by Treasury Board officials well before the election was called, did not show good judgment. In any event, it did become a political football during the election campaign.
During the campaign, the Liberals decided they would cancel the deal. This points out one of the weaknesses in the political process in our country. If someone of high enough stature within any political party, including our political party, but in the political world says something and then instead of saying: "Whoops, maybe I should not have said that", or: "Whoops, I was wrong", all the king's horses and all the king's men are rallied to support whatever position the person in power might have presented. Whether that position was right or wrong, good or bad, whether it was wise or just ill-tempered, it always seems that we have to salute the flag. No matter what flag is on the pole when we go by it we salute it. This is the genesis of the whole Pearson airport problem.
During the thrust of the election debate, because of the perception that this was an ill-timed move by the Conservatives to perhaps reward their friends before their government fell, the Liberals during the heat of the campaign said that they would cancel the Pearson airport deal. It was a campaign promise just like: "We will scrap, abolish, get rid of the GST".
Had the Liberals opposite worked with the same dispatch to get rid of the GST, there would be rejoicing in the land. But they did not. What they did do was work with dispatch but without much reason to cancel the Pearson airport deal. Why? Pourquoi? Because it was perceived to be a sweetheart deal that would favour some of the Tories that were part of it. That is the political reality of the situation.
As it turns out, this whole deal starts to unravel. After it was cancelled, and after the people who were negatively impacted were able to prove that they had gone into a deal with the Government of Canada in good faith, the Government of Canada in order to save any semblance of face or any semblance of honesty to ensure that the Government of Canada's word was its bond, had to buy its way out.
Now we have a situation where the taxpayers of Canada have to cough up something like half a billion dollars or $800 million because someone, probably the Prime Minister and those on the Liberal side, made an ill-timed, ill-tempered campaign promise. He should have said: "We will review it carefully and if it turns out that it is wrong, we will cancel it". He did not. He said: "We are going to cancel it". Eight hundred million dollars later we have no change in the airport, we have no new airport. It is the busiest airport in the country and nothing is happening.
This motion and the situation represented by the Pearson airport deal is perhaps a lesson to all of us in politics. Our fiduciary responsibility is not to ourselves, it is not to the parties that we represent, it is to the people whom we represent. It is to the individual citizens of Canada whether they voted for us or not.
We are charged with the responsibility of using our best efforts to do the right thing for the right reason at the right time. We need to put politics behind us and put principle ahead of us. That is what this issue is all about: politics before principle. In my opinion, we should be making sure that the foundation of everything we do is based on principle and not politics.