Mr. Speaker, I would like to start off by doing something just a little different. I have to offer the House a correction of what my own colleague, the hon. member for Simcoe Centre said.
He pointed out that the Prime Minister had said: "There is not one single promise I will not keep," and he suggested that he did not live up to that. I have to point out to my hon. colleague that the Prime Minister, in fact, did. The Prime Minister said there was not one promise that he would not keep and he is absolutely right. There is a whole pile of them.
The Prime Minister likes to twist things around and use semantics. By doing that, he is technically correct but it is a bigger shame to say that he did not keep one promise. He did not keep any of his promises, relatively speaking.
I am the Reform Party's transport critic. I might add the national transport critic. I would like to focus my comments on those transport issues that relate to this budget.
One in which I have had a lot of involvement is probably one of the bigger and more scandalous pieces of legislation that this Liberal government has been involved in, and that is the Pearson airport development contract.
I did not see anywhere in this budget proposal money allocated for the cost that this government is going to incur because of its unwarranted interference in the private marketplace and its overturning of the rule of law in the mess that it has started with this Pearson airport legislation.
There are all kinds of costs involved in that legislation and one cost which is huge and growing daily are legal costs. I see nothing under transport that shows the cost of defending this absolutely unconscionable legislation originally called Bill C-22. Now I believe it is Bill C-28. It was hardly worth giving it a new number when it came through the House again. It only took one minute and 35 seconds. Nobody was allowed to speak on it. I do not think it was worth the costs for that second time around.
The government had to involve its legal and justice departments in order to draft this terrible piece of legislation. Then when justice did seem to prevail a bit and it could not get this bill through the House and through the Senate, the consortium, as is its right in normal society, took the matter to the Supreme Court of Ontario.
First the government used the might of the tax dollar, the Canadian taxpayers' money, and mounted first a legal challenge to try to prevent it from going to court.
That cost us a bundle of money right there. There is nothing in the budget about that. When they lost all their stalling tactics and ran out of things they could do, they finally went to court.
The court case was dealing with whether there was a contract and if so was the government in breach of that contract. The government mounted a tremendous defence with a battery of justice department lawyers and lost.
There were big costs involved in that. There is nothing in the budget dealing with that or future legal costs. Having lost it and having the unlimited resources of Canadian taxpayer money, they mounted an appeal.
They did all their preparation, it went to court and through the whole appeal process. They lost again. Millions and millions more of taxpayer dollars were wasted. Now they are in court for a third time, with the court having recognized that there was a contract and that the government was in breach of that contract.
The government, having exhausted its appeal rights, is now in court asking what compensation should be given. When we get the compensation, the consortium that had a contract, which the courts have said was a legal and binding contract breached by the government, is asking for over $600 million in compensation.
Most of this is lost opportunity for profit. This is a normal thing to sue for when one unjustifiably has a contract taken away. Once again, the government has its battery of lawyers trying to defend the terrible piece of legislation the Liberal government brought forward.
Again it is costing untold amounts of taxpayer dollars. This is in this fiscal year, but nothing in the budget. There is nothing in the budget about the compensation package either.
Are we getting our money's worth for all these millions of dollars in legal costs? Here in the House the government said for two years while this bill was going through that this was a terrible contract, that it was far too rich and that the developers would make too much money. That was the justification for the cancellation.
What have these lawyers done with all the money they are spending, money that is not in the budget? What are they using for a defence? They are saying to the court there should not be any costs awarded to the contract holder for lost profit. It was such a bad contract with such a likelihood of the contractors going broke that they probably would not have made any money at all.
It seems like one side of the justice department lawyers should get together with the other side and get their stories straight. If the
government is then to squander millions of dollars on legal defence of this legislation, at least we might get something by way of some value for our money.
Let us look at the financial impact of the contract. Thousands of jobs were involved in this contract at not $1 cost to the Canadian taxpayer. One of the many utopian schemes the Liberal government came out with is jobs, jobs, jobs; it would create jobs.
Before the government started running on this, there were studies done that indicated that it cost the government $75,000 to create a $35,000 job. For this, it gets $10,000 worth of economic benefits, tax revenues versus paying out on social programs, for a net loss of $65,000 a job. That is the cost to the Canadian taxpayer of the government's buying jobs.
Now that the government has run through its infamous job creation program dealing with infrastructure, if we take the number of permanent jobs the government claims it created and divide it by the amount of money spent, we find $75,000 a job. Is that not interesting?
Thousands of jobs could be created by the contract the government cancelled with not $1 of cost to the Canadian taxpayer. The contract holders were to spend over $800 million at not one dime cost to the Canadian taxpayer.
I do not see anything anywhere in the budget dealing with replacing those jobs at Pearson airport at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Because this construction is not going on, we have tax loss of all kinds.
The government specifically banned passenger facility tax to the consortium to build this. Now it has to build the facilities itself at a cost now of over $1 billion. There is nothing in the budget for that.