Mr. Speaker, perhaps I am the only one asking questions because I am the only one who has actually read the reports.
There have been ample reports tabled on this issue over three years, and they are definitive. One of my favourites was a report that was the groundwork for the formal request to get someone to do a full environmental assessment, not by the port authority but under the provincial laws, because the lake is actually a provincial park. The bed of the lake where the airport wants to expand is actually owned by the Province of Ontario as a provincial park, yet the provincial environmental assessment process is forbidden from kicking in. The federal one trumps it.
The foundation report made a very interesting finding. One of the proponents said that we could extend the runways by half a kilometre into the lake and we could build new fish habitats at the end of each runway. We would do this because we found that when we studied the existing airport, there was no fish habitat in the Toronto harbour next to the airport. When we asked why there was no fish habitat there, the report said it was because the island airport dumps all of the runway snow into the lake and has killed the fish habitat, so what the proposal actually said we were going to do was to extend the runway and kill more fish habitat as we create it.
The environmental assessment, though, did not take into account the impact on the natural environment, because the scope of the environmental assessment did not do that.
Would the member opposite agree that an environmental assessment that was not authorized and did not meet the threshold of consultation that is defined by the Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto, an environmental assessment that does not take into consideration the existing law, is in fact not really an environmental assessment at all?