Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Nepean--Carleton.
Before I address the substance of the Conservative motion that we are debating in the House today, as the agriculture and agri-food critic for the official opposition, I would like to take this opportunity to honour the men and women of this country who, day after day, work tirelessly to produce and process the food that we eat.
The value of the work of these men and women not only often gets ignored, but to add insult to injury, over the last few decades numerous levels of government have made life for producers on the farm more and more difficult. Whether it be through burdensome regulations, misguided legislation, flawed assistance programs, or simply being completely ignored in times of crisis, Canadian producers and farm families have suffered greatly at the hands of the Liberal government.
In spite of the Liberal government's legacy of disrespect for the agriculture community, Canadian producers and processors continue to produce the world's greatest and safest food supply.
In spite of being largely ignored during the current BSE crisis, cattle and livestock producers continue to press on with a resilience and a determination to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
In my riding alone, many producers with whom I have spoken and visited have conveyed to me their increasing frustration with the bureaucratic and regulatory nonsense that they have to endure at the hands of the Liberal government's gross mismanagement of the agricultural file.
Agricultural producers have a unique and demonstrable relationship with the lands they own and farm. For many farmers the lands that they own have been passed on to them by their ancestors, dating back several generations. This passing on of the family farm from generation to generation has long been the reality for many farm families. Unfortunately, due to the lack of support and respect that the Liberal government affords to Canadian farm families, the dream of passing on the family farm to the next generation is fading for all too many Canadian farm families.
To have this dream shattered by government mismanagement and poor public policy is a wrong that needs to be addressed by the Liberal government. Canadian farm families deserve respect from all levels of government. Rural issues continue to be ignored by the Liberal government. My constituents are tired of hearing of the Liberal urban agenda and gas tax for cities. They demand better from their government.
My constituents demand a government that will be responsive to, and dare I say this, the rural agenda. It is this lack of attention to rural Canadians that has led to the increasing polarization of rural and urban Canada. That is a shame.
To address the subject of our motion today, a prime example of Liberal mismanagement and disrespect of the agriculture community is evidenced by the situation that Quebec farmers had to face when their farmlands were expropriated by the Liberal government for Mirabel.
Before I go on, I find it highly ironic that Mirabel airport was in large part the baby of the former prime minister, the right hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau. In spite of this, it is the height of irony that the other airport in Montreal currently bears his name. Perhaps this was the Liberal Party's attempt to hide the legacy of the former prime minister who gave birth to the Mirabel white elephant, but I digress.
There is a common principle of justice in this country. It is called making amends for past wrongs. For example, the Liberal government recognizes the need to right past wrongs that the federal government has unjustly imposed upon Canada's aboriginal peoples. In so doing, the government is doing the right thing.
With regard to the injustices suffered by Canadian hepatitis C victims at the hands of the Liberals, the government recently agreed to compensate them. In this regard, I would like to commend my hon. colleagues in the Conservative Party who have been unrelenting in their pursuit of justice for those hepatitis C victims. Principally, I would like to commend our health critic, the member for Charleswood--St. James--Assiniboia; the Conservative member for Yellowhead; and the former member for Macleod, Dr. Grant Hill, for their tireless work for justice in this regard.
The Liberal government's capitulation on the hepatitis C compensation issue was the right thing to do. We in the Conservative Party applaud the government for its recent actions in this regard, however overdue its response may have been. Nonetheless, the Liberals continue to stall on other files where they so clearly made poor policy and poor management decisions.
It is no secret that the Liberals told Canadians to trust them with the gun registry. They said it would only cost taxpayers $2 million. We know that the Liberals were never good at math and that their projections for the total cost of the gun registry were off the mark by only a couple of billion dollars.
The Liberals should be ashamed for having treated the public purse with such disregard and disrespect. On behalf of my constituents, I demand that the Liberal government acknowledge its complete and utter mismanagement of the gun registry, do the right thing, and scrap it altogether.
Turning to the matter that we are debating in the House today, the incredible sense of attachment and belonging to the land that farmers feel is precisely what makes what happened at Mirabel such a disgrace. To have displaced 3,200 farm families from their land to the tune of 97,000 acres, an area equivalent to two-thirds of the city of Montreal, is beyond comprehension.
This mass expropriation displaced almost 12,000 people. Much of this displacement occurred through force. Many houses were torn down, stores were displaced and families were thrown out. The Department of Transport virtually wiped out the economic life of 10 villages. Former owners were asked to lease their own heritage for indeterminate periods.
To highlight the complete and utter mismanagement of the Liberals on this file, of the 97,000 acres expropriated for the purposes of the airport, Mirabel never used more than 5,000 acres for its airport operations. That is less than 5% of the total area expropriated.
It was not until a Conservative government was in power that the wrongs inflicted by the Liberal government on these farm families were largely addressed. In the 1980s, 80,000 acres of the original 97,000 acres were ceded back to their original owners. This was thanks in large part to the hard work of Conservative MP Lise Bourgault and the support of the then minister of public works, Roch LaSalle.
We are again caught in a situation that proves once again how poorly the Liberals manage public funds. Mirabel airport is a white elephant, a monument to Liberal arrogance, waste and mismanagement.
The farming families living in the area want to turn the page and go back to a normal life. It is high time the Liberal government take responsibility for this white elephant and apologize to the families that were so badly treated throughout this entire matter.
So unless the Liberal government can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is necessary to keep the 11,000 acres of unused land in Mirabel, it should give them back to the farmers.
On this side of the House, we understand the suffering of these people and we feel for them. I hope that the Liberal government will recognize its wrongdoing, take responsibility and make amends.