Mr. Speaker, as you can tell, only Liberals can make that last budget sound so rosy. It is unfortunate that they tend to forget a lot of things that happened before and after that budget. Two committees come to mind, one being the environment committee and the other being the transport committee.
My colleague from Windsor--St. Clair worked very hard on the environment committee. Members of the committee came to unanimous agreement on various amendments and brought the bill back to the House of Commons only to have the Liberal government rip the guts out of those amendments and proceed in its own way. This made a facade of the environmental committee's work.
The committee does not need to go back to Canadians to ask for their opinions because it has already done that. The committee heard from industry, environmental groups, aboriginal groups, the provinces and so on. To delay that process another two years makes committee work a facade, and it is most unfortunate.
The transport committee made a unanimous recommendation to have a labour representative on the board. What did the government do? It slapped its Liberal members on the head and told them it did not care what they thought. It told them it would proceed in its own unilateral approach. That does nothing for democracy in Canada.
I want to speak about the $24 airport tax. Instead of listening to reason and reducing the tax, what did the government do? It imposed a $24 fee on airline fares, $12 one way and $24 return. I could not believe the transport minister had the gall to do this. To offset the new Liberal tax, the government asked the airline companies to reduce their fares so the travelling public would not be harmed by the tax. I do not think I have ever heard a minister of the government say that before. It is funny that I never heard the Liberals say that when the GST was brought in. I never heard them say that when all the other taxes were brought in. I never heard them tell the business community to lower its prices so they could add even more taxes. It is unbelievable.
If this new $24 charge goes forward, the government will take approximately $60 million per year out of the local economy of Atlantic Canada. How much money will the Liberals put back into Atlantic Canada for security reasons? I suspect they will take a lot of that money and put it into the RCMP, the coast guard or into ports and then tell everyone to look at what they are doing.