Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to rise on this motion by the Conservative Party, which asks that the 11,000 unused acres of land outside the perimeter of Mirabel airport be returned and made available to the farmers and individuals who owned this property.
There are a couple of reasons why I am very pleased that my party has brought forward this motion. One of them is that it puts a spotlight on one of the sorriest chapters of the Trudeau legacy in this country.
In the early 1970s the government made an announcement that it was going to expropriate approximately 97,000 acres of land for a new airport in Montreal. To put this in perspective, it is as if the people in my riding of Niagara Falls on their way home this afternoon heard that the Government of Canada was going to expropriate the Town of Fort Erie, all of the City of Niagara Falls and displace every resident in the town of Niagara-on-the-Lake. Those are the proportions that we are talking about.
To put further into context the 97,000 acres of land, Heathrow Airport, which I believe may be the busiest airport in the world, has 2,700 acres of land, Los Angeles has 3,500, and Toronto has 4,200. Even with this motion, another 1,000 acres are available to Mirabel airport over and above that which is allocated to Toronto, despite the fact that passenger service now is discontinued at Mirabel airport and we have no idea from the government when it is going to reopen again, although we hear it will be some time in the future.
Nonetheless, that is not what we are talking about. We are not talking about those 5,200 acres. We are talking about the 11,000 acres that are unused and unneeded. That is what we are talking about. I believe it was one of the saddest chapters in the Trudeau legacy. I put it to the Minister of Transport and his friend, the member for Glengarry—Prescott—Russell, what is in it for them to defend what so clearly was a mistake on behalf of their party? Neither of them were ministers in Mr. Trudeau's government. They were ministers under subsequent Liberal prime ministers. What is it about them and their colleagues that they cannot admit this obvious mistake?
The mistakes were compounded at that particular site. They grew and grew and never once did the government ever take responsibility for it when there were hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cost overruns. Members may remember what the government said. It said it was the contractors who were to blame. The local authorities were to blame. At one point the Province of Quebec was to blame. Everybody was to blame except the federal Liberals.