Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand to address what is a very important issue. I believe this is a great injustice, one that is old in a sense but one that is renewed because the government is refusing to step in now and right an old wrong.
I should mention, Mr. Speaker, that I am splitting my time with the member for Carleton—Mississippi Mills.
This is an issue that goes back 35 years, and it deals with Mirabel Airport. At that time, 97,000 acres of land was expropriated. When this was done originally, it was rammed through, it affected approximately 12,000 people and it was completely unnecessary. The government of the day completely miscalculated the amount of land it would need to set up Mirabel Airport, which was a disaster anyway. It was a huge white elephant, and to this very day, we are still finding out how much of a white elephant it really was. It got smaller and smaller, and now it only takes cargo.
The point that I am trying to make is the government expropriated a tremendous amount of land unnecessarily. Cabinet documents, which were revealed in the last little while, show that the government recognized a couple of years after the expropriation had taken place that it had made a huge mistake, but it decided to plough on anyway.
A number of issues flow from this. One of them is the complete disrespect for the thousands of people who the government threw off the land. It is a story of an abuse of the power to expropriate because the government did not take the time to think it through. The government of the day was completely ham-fisted in its approach to this. It did not use its powers carefully. People who did not have to leave the land were thrown off it anyway.
It is also a story of a complete lack of respect for the issue of property rights. This is an important part of our fundamental freedoms. Unfortunately, the government does not understand that. We see that reflected all the time in legislation. We saw that with the species at risk legislation where the government again took a very ham-fisted approach that would allow people to be forced off their own land, if somebody noticed some kind of endangered species on it. They would not be allowed to have access to that land and would receive no compensation for losing the enjoyment of it. We see this consistent pattern when it comes to the government and the issue of property rights.
Today this injustice continues. It was an injustice 35 years ago when the government threw thousands of people off the land. These people today are still in situations where there has been tremendous human suffering. These are ancestral lands, which people had owned for generations. They were thrown off them and in some cases were provided some very small compensation at the time.