Yes, well, it was an ordeal at times, Mr. Speaker, because I generally have a lot of respect for the member and I certainly was interested in hearing what he would say.
I was really disappointed in his presentation. Only for a very short time during his speech today did the member deal with the people affected by this expropriation. He tried to get as far away as he possibly could from the wrong that was caused back then during the expropriation.
Yes, he talked about things that are going on at Mirabel and he talked about the Conservatives. He did not mention that it was the Progressive Conservative Party of the time that actually got 80,000 acres back into the agricultural mix. This land is now being worked.
As the member knows, the Progressive Conservatives were trying to do whatever they could to make the best out of a really bad mistake made by the Liberals. Mirabel is the biggest white elephant in the history of this country, I believe, but no, not quite, the EH-101s probably are.
However, I want to get to the point here. The member talked about the expropriation process. He said “this did not happen in a legal vacuum”. Probably not. There are provisions under the Expropriation Act which ensure that people get compensation.
However, there is one thing missing in that act and that is the right of people who do not want to sell to refuse, people who want to stay on their land, who want to stay with the dream they had to have a farm for their generation and generations to come. That right of saying, “No, I do not want to sell”, is not in there.
The Trudeau government of the day used the Expropriation Act and whatever cabinet powers they had, in my opinion, because of the price they paid, which was about $200 an acre, to basically cheat the landowners out of their property. I use that word because they got it at bargain basement prices. The Trudeau government knew what it was doing, because not a year later down in Pickering they were prepared to pay about $2,000 an acre for raw farmland.
It clearly shows that the government took advantage of the people living in the Mirabel area. They took advantage to plunder their farms for what turned out to be a very bad investment. The government just refused to recognize the wrong.
Our party wants to talk about the future of the families that wanted to stay there and the people who still want to get back so they can have their future as well.