Mr. speaker, I appreciate the members who spoke on behalf of my motion. I do want to take the parliamentary secretary to task for some of the things he said. I can understand, coming from the Hamilton harbour area, how he might have dredged up some of his remarks. It would not be uncommon. The member has engaged in that type of activity many times in this House.
In his remarks it was only when he deviated from the written word prepared by the minister's department that he got in trouble. When he speaks off the top of his head and he has to speak on his own, he always gets in trouble.
I am going to take him to task on some of the things he said in this House which are not accurate. He buys into every single thing the people from New York and New Jersey have said about this project. Shame on him.
I think it is time he did his own investigative work on this project. What he talked about is the number of jobs that would be created in this deal. Do you know what it would be? Five jobs, as indicated by the first spokesman for the group as represented by the Randy Waterman interests. His name was Wayne Lockhart. In a public meeting he said to a citizens group there would be five jobs. Why? Because it is not labour intensive. It is done by the use of the biggest equipment known to mankind, so there are not a lot of jobs.
That was not good enough. How are five jobs going to get the interest of any community? How is a community going to get excited over five jobs given the fact that they could decimate a pristine historic river? They went back to the drawing board. When they presented their papers to the province of New Brunswick for submission for the project, the five jobs had suddenly grown to 50 jobs on the same project.
This is where the parliamentary secretary should have done his work. The investigation of any quarry site, any aggregate site, based on the amount of volume they are going to do out of this quarry, in North America would be five jobs. They used an exaggerated number of jobs to gain the attention of the province of New Brunswick.
When the loudmouth from Hamilton speaks and claims that I have a conflict of interest because I live in the area, he is absolutely correct. I carried this fight on long before I arrived in this House. I am working on behalf of my constituents. I am not going to lay over and play dead because of the big boys from New York and New Jersey.
I do not know where this guy is getting his information, but I will tell members one thing. It is not coming from the citizens of the area that I represent. He is being fed information directly out of New York and New Jersey to support their case. There is a direct funnel into the heart of the government of the province of New Brunswick via Al Lacey, a former member of the crown.
In this particular case, as the Reform member mentioned, Doug Young, a paid lobbyist, is on the record as working on behalf of these people. A former minister of the crown actually was the architect for the privatization act. If he is going to speak about the project, if he is going to speak about individuals, he should get his facts right.
The environmental process used in the province of New Brunswick is a flawed process. The citizens of the area asked for a full scale independent environmental assessment of the project. That is all they asked for.
What do they have? They have an in-house process that actually flies in the face of scientific information provided. In fact, the citizens of the area hired two certified geologists to examine the area in question. Do members know what they found? Three fault lines in the area, two of which run through the very businesses in the area, which the province of New Brunswick or the proponents of the project have never declared publicly. Why? Because they would upset the very businesses in the area, one being owned by Moore Clark, one being owned by a company called Woodstock Cold Storage, and others.
It is documented by two certified geologists that this project would endanger those very businesses and the infrastructure in the area, information absolutely overlooked by the parliamentary secretary and all the environmentalists on the payroll of the province of New Brunswick.
That tells me there is something wrong when the transparency we are asking for is not evident anywhere in the process. It is absolutely bizarre.