Madam Speaker, no rhetorical farce is ever fully complete without a cameo appearance by the member for Scarborough--Agincourt.
Speaking of donkeys coming to work, the idea of amortizing the cost of the equipment over the life of the equipment is standard practice in the private sector. I am not saying we should have 20 year old security equipment at airports 20 years from now. It would be up to the government to decide what constitutes the life of the equipment.
If the member believes that the airports should replace this equipment after five years, then the government should set it at five years and scale the cost of the equipment over five years, not in year one. All I am advocating is that anything would be better than paying it all in year one, which is what the government is planning to do.
It can scale it or pick a number but it should not pay all the cash up front. I will tell the member why. He is from a constituency in Toronto. Toronto has a lot of airline competition and it will continue over the years because of the size of the population. However I would invite the member to go to Grand Prairie or to Prince George. In fact, he might want to bring the former secretary of state for multiculturalism, the member for Vancouver Centre, when he goes to Prince George and investigate those supposed cross burnings while he is at it. He should go to Prince George, to Vernon, to Grand Prairie, to places in Saskatchewan, to Churchill Falls and tell the people that the government should pay cash up front for all this equipment, which it does not need to do, and that they have to pay a huge tax up front which could drive small, local, regional air carriers into the ground and people will not have jet service.
The member can make glib comments all he wants about donkeys, dinosaurs and all that nonsensical stuff, but it is a substantive policy question that will have a real impact on small communities and local small regional carriers. I would encourage him to take a plane outside of Toronto or Ottawa, because the impact is real. I do not say that as some rhetorical slap, I mean that sincerely. He should fly to remote parts of this country and tell them there that there will not be an impact from this tax, because they will tell him a very different story.