The transport minister says it was the NDP. That is quite correct. The NDP did not want property rights in at the time but that does not absolve the government of the time. The Progressive Conservatives were in support of it and the federal Liberals should have gone ahead with it but they did not.
Nonetheless, people wherever they come from in the world always tell me the same thing. Many of those individuals have come from communist countries. We can talk about the blight of communism. We can talk about how communism ruined every economy in which it took hold and how one of the things that is consistent about people from that was their loss of private property. It touches people deeply.
Indeed, we do not have to come from a communist country. I remember a colleague of mine, a man by the name of Kevin Mulvey, whom I went to school with at the University of Windsor and who told me that when he graduated from Windsor he bought a home in the Windsor area. I congratulated him on that. He told me he believed that he was the first member of his family to ever own land. He was an emigrant from England and his family had never owned land. This was something that touched him very deeply.
Indeed, my own ancestors came from Scotland as a result of property problems. Members may be aware of something in history known as the Highland clearances in the 1800s, in which Scottish citizens, including members of my own family, were evicted. They had lived there since the beginning of recorded time, but through government policy or government complicity they were evicted in the 1850s and they immigrated to Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Over the years I have been in touch with many generations of my own family as I knew them. We have never received an apology for that. Nonetheless they came to other countries and indeed they have tried, but that is what drove them out of Scotland.
Indeed, when I was there on my honeymoon I could not help but reflect on that when we drove through the empty valleys. I wondered if anyone had any second thoughts about clearing out the population of the Highlands in Scotland.
Nonetheless this is something that is very deep in all human beings. I thought about those thousands of people who were evicted from their expropriated land. We saw the heartbreak and the heartache that accompanied it. It seems to me that there are many Canadians who could identify with this.
For some of those individuals, it is not even as if today the Government of Canada was going to expropriate the city of Niagara Falls. I have lived in my home for 16 years. I could live with it. If my home was taken away, I could go somewhere else although I would never want to leave the area of Niagara Falls, Fort Erie and Niagara-on-the-Lake.
It seems to me that the people who were the victims of this aspect of the Trudeau legacy were not people who just lived there or had just moved into the neighbourhood. These people and their ancestors had been there for over 300 years. Talk about deep roots in an area: for over 300 years those individuals and their families had lived there and raised their children and these were the individuals who found out on an afternoon on the radio that their land was going to be expropriated for the new Mirabel airport.