Mr. Speaker, it is unfortunate that the hon. member clearly did not listen to the point I was making. With respect to his point about local control, it is very clear that there are certain responsibilities that are more effectively handled at some levels of government than others. Of course, I am not saying that absolutely everything should be done by the municipality.
Something like interprovincial transportation is constitutionally a federal government power, and it makes sense that it is because it involves and goes across the whole country. But specifically, this is a decision about an airport inside the city of Toronto and something that the people of Toronto have the primary stake in, and it is quite sensible to have their involvement in the decision.
The principle of local control is that as much as possible, decisions should be made at the level that is closest to the people. That is the principle behind our convictions of local control, which might be called subsidiarity, which we value.
In terms of past decisions at Toronto city council, again, that is exactly the point. It should be to the greatest possible extent their decision to make. If the people of Toronto decide they do not want this, so be it, but what has happened is that the federal government has sought to put the kibosh on this.
In terms of the cost of federal spending, again I want to be very clear about what I said. It is not that all federal spending is bad. The member is completely misconstruing what I said, intentionally or not. My point is that we should seek to leverage investment by the private sector for the benefit of the economy as much as possible. We should not ignore the possibility of private sector investment. We should use that to our advantage. There is a role for the public sector as well, but we should seek to leverage the private sector involvement as much as possible.