Mr. Speaker, I appreciated the member's comments. He did have his facts straight. The interpretation of them may not have been as good, but at least the facts were straight.
The member mentioned that 67% of the folks there voted in favour of the treaty. I just want to remind him that out of 350 members, only 160 actually live on the reserve. The vote was largely carried by people who live elsewhere in Canada and in the United States.
The other point I want to make is in regard to the issue of land. The member mentioned land value and there are a couple of points I would like to make about that.
That land was essentially a salt marsh until farmers went in and diked it, and started to cultivate it. That land was not of much use to anybody. I know that the member was quoting the government when he said that the value of the land was about $67 million. That is a long way off the real value of the land.
We are talking about 1,700 acres, I believe, that are being transferred to the Tsawwassen. When the government first acknowledged the treaty, it gave the treaty a total value of $70 million. At that time I went to the real estate authorities to check the value of farmland for half of that 1,700 acres. I put an industrial value on the other land that is going to be transferred into the port. I lowballed the value of both the industrial land and the farmland and came up with the figure of $250 million for the land alone.
There is a strong NDP supporter back home who sat in the Barrett government in the seventies and has been a Richmond councillor for over 30 years. In fact, the community of Steveston is named after his family. He said “[The member for Delta--Richmond East] has got it all wrong”. He said the real value of that land is at least $500 million.
We have been somewhat misled. We somehow think that this is going to turn out great for everybody. But remember, I said 500 acres are going to be industrialized. A rail line from the port is going in to that land. There is going to be container storage to service the port and warehousing.
The key question here is: Would that member want to live adjacent to that kind of industrial area? If anyone anywhere else in North America or the western world is living that close to an industrial area that is servicing a port, they are living in a slum. A minority number of Tsawwassen band members are going to be living next to an industrial area in an area that anywhere else in the western world would be called a slum. Is the member in favour of that?