Mr. Speaker, the parliamentary secretary kept bringing up farmers over and over again. He made numerous references to the 1972 expropriation of land by the federal government and then the one-year leases that have since followed. Many of the farms that the member was speaking about are actually outside of the land that was expropriated.
There are still some farms today, but there is actually only one family farm that is left from that original era when the land was expropriated. It is owned by the Tapscotts, who folks in Scarborough will know quite well. They immigrated from Scarborough to Pickering to farm that land and they have been sitting on those one-year leases ever since.
The member made reference to how horrible it was that all that land was stripped away, but then successive governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have continued to ignore that problem. He is worried about the loss of a bit of farmland upstream from the area that he thinks needs to be protected. If the land upstream is not protected, then the land downstream will not be protected either.
We have class 1 farmland in that expropriated land that could be turned to farming today. It is laying fallow. Why does the government not want to address that issue, which would also help the park, instead of continuing with this plan? It hurt farmers again when the government reannounced plans for the airport that we are not sure we need.