The minister says it was public interest. What about the interests of those 12,000 people? That is what I ask him. What about their interests? Who was worried about them? Certainly not the government of the time.
I remember when the move was made in the 1980s to try to rectify this. Let us guess who was up on their feet in the House of Commons fighting it every step of the way. It was the members of the Liberal Party. We would have to have seen the debates to believe it. They threw up every roadblock and every argument about getting into that area. Why? Because they had to confront the mistakes of their own past. That was what the problem was.
That is what the problem is today. They do not want to talk about it. I listened to the Minister of Transport and I am sure we will hear other members of the government. They want to talk about everything, everything else except the thousands of people who lost their property.
They do not want to talk about all those individuals who might get their properties back today because they do not want to have to confront that. If one asks members of the Liberal Party about the expropriation at Mirabel, they will want to talk about the price of coffee in Mexico or they will reach in their pockets and want to show pictures of their grandchildren, anything to get off the subject of those thousands of people who lost their properties.