moved:
That the House call on the government to apologize to those whose land was expropriated in Mirabel, to acknowledge the collective trauma these expropriations caused for thousands of Quebeckers who were forced to abandon their homes, their communities and their livelihoods, and to urge the government not to undertake such expropriations again without public consultation, social licence and appropriate compensation.
Mr. Speaker, today, I would like to take people back to March 27, 1961, the day when Mirabel supposedly entered the modern world, the day when 14 municipalities and towns were dismantled. That day, the federal government delivered 3,126 expropriation notices and took possession of 97,000 acres of land. According to estimate, these expropriations affected between 1,700 and 3,000 families.
At that time, Sainte-Scholastique and Sainte-Monique ceased to exist and Saint-Augustin, Saint-Benoît, Saint-Canut, Saint-Hermas, Saint-Janvier, Saint-Jérusalem, Saint-Antoine-des-Laurentides, Sainte-Sophie, Saint-Placide, Saint-André-d'Argenteuil, Lachute and Sainte-Thérèse-Ouest were also affected.
The people affected by this were fathers, mothers, children, uncles, aunts, farmers, teachers, agronomists and mechanics. On March 27, 1969, these 10,000 people all become the expropriated people of Mirabel, a label and an identity that will follow them their whole lives.
Following the announcement, the federal government went to Sainte-Scholastique. There, federal minister Jean Marchand announced between 75,000 and 100,000 jobs, a windfall of jobs that never materialized, or at least not on a permanent basis.
We were promised modernity. Pierre Elliott Trudeau came to Mirabel and promised us that we would be stepping into the modern world with all the good things that came with that. When Pierre Elliott Trudeau left the room, people did not feel reassured because their questions had not been answered, and yet the question they were asking were very simple. They wanted to know when they would have to leave, how much money they would get and how they would be paid. They wanted to know whether they would have to go work in a shop in Montreal and where their children would go to school. These were real questions that went unanswered at the time, even though they were entirely legitimate.
The people of my riding eventually came together in the early 1970s to defend the expropriated. They founded the CIAC, the Centre d'information et d'action communautaire. Members will recall Jean‑Paul Raymond and Rita Léonard‑Lafond, who passed away last fall and to whom I paid tribute in the House. They are heroes for defending the expropriated. However, even as a group, they never managed to find out why the area expropriated was so large, so unnecessarily large, so aggressively large.
We now know that Ottawa knew it was over-expropriating and that it was a land grab. Ottawa must have known. We now know that it knew, but it was obvious. In Mirabel, 97,000 acres of land were expropriated. I would like Quebeckers to understand that what the federal government stole was the equivalent of the island of Laval. I would like my friends in the rest of Canada to know that the area taken from Mirabel was three and a half times the city of Vancouver, nearly two thirds of the city of Toronto today or half of the city of Edmonton. I hope that people understand that everyone back home knew that it was theft and that it was unreasonable.
What was expropriated was 20 times the size of New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, 33 times the size of London's Heathrow, 25 times the size of today's Vancouver Airport, and 25 times the size of Los Angeles Airport. It was, as I said, a theft, and a theft without fair compensation. Back home, when compensation was given, those with the right political connections were worth more than ordinary folks, as the parish priest used to say, and the offers were not negotiable. The federal appraisers were accommodating. Since they did not actually need all that land to build the airport, people lived in limbo. Some, once expropriated, became tenants in their own homes. In fact, many did, unable to clear their land or improve their farms. They lived day to day, barely getting by, waiting for the moment when some official from Ottawa would knock on their door and tell them to leave, maybe even burning the house down, as they had seen happen to the homes of their neighbours and their children's friends. This was in a farming community where families live close together, where a father, to leave a house and land for his children, would build a new house across the road. That is what happened in Mirabel.
While people were being kept on as tenants in their own homes, they had to ask the federal government for permission to do anything, such as replacing the roof, building a barn, even painting a wall. There are stories of people who had to ask officials for permission just to put up wallpaper in the kitchen. They were required to ask the federal government for approval to paint their little girl's bedroom pink, and the officials would tell them they would prefer it to be blue or white. That was the level of psychological abuse that the victims of the federal government's expropriation powers were subjected to.
This federal government acquired those lands at bargain prices. We have examples, documented by historians. There is the example of Françoise Drapeau-Monette, who is listening to us today, and who was offered $1,000 for a 20‑foot by 20‑foot parcel of land, while the price in the region was over $3,000, according to independent appraisers. The federal government was paying for an airport and needed one-twentieth of what it was taking from humble Canadians at a 70% discount. History shows that if a landowner had the audacity to want to negotiate a price, federal appraisers would come back and threaten them with lower prices. For the sake of speeding things up, for the sake of a project that we were told was transformational, for the sake of bringing in modernity, the government wanted to force the people back home to accept the first offer. Things had to move quickly.
There are also reports of cases like that of Ernest Courcelle, who was offered $40,000 for his land. He wanted to negotiate the price, so the federal government showed up at his door one morning and told him that if he did not agree today, if he did not sign today, it would be $10,000 tomorrow. These cases are not made up, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them. In short, dozens of public servants came to steal Mirabel, an act that is an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada, not to mention arbitrary.
There is the example of the Rhéaume brothers, whose lands and homes were identical, built by the same people in the same year, and which were across from each other. One brother was offered $63,000 for his land and the other brother was offered $133,000 for his land. It was non-negotiable, otherwise the offers would be reduced. This reminds us of an unfortunate economic reality. During an expropriation, when the people whose land is being expropriated are not protected by laws and when those laws are weakened, it is the buyer who sets the price and it is the buyer who has the upper hand.
Today we are talking about access to home ownership, a recurring theme in the House. In Mirabel, in the 1970s, the recurring theme was properties that were being stolen, purchased at bargain basement prices, from people who had many children, who were well-established in their communities, who had a reputation in the agricultural community. They were in fact unable to find alternative housing with the amounts they were being offered, and that was when they knew when they had to move out. Government appraisers acknowledged, and this is true, that this was unfair. However, they went so far as to shirk their responsibilities by pointing out that the people—who sometimes became tenants on their own land, in some cases for 18 years—had gotten a good deal on their rent from the federal government. Why were they complaining? They were able to rent their land and the federal government was such a good landlord. That tragedy is still being felt to this day.
Unlike similar lots in Quebec, some of these remain uncultivated woodlands because tenant farmers were unable to invest in clearing them. Some of Quebec's most fertile land today remains uncultivated woodland because those people were denied the right to invest. Some were tenants on their own land for two decades. They never received any compensation for the improvements they had to make to their land to earn a living.
These people are no strangers to tragedy. They have scars. In some cases, the land had been farmed for generations, and the woman had inherited the land but her husband had heart problems. He did not have it in him to fight the federal government, and his wife did not want to blow through her inheritance. There were cases of depression, suicide, domestic violence, illness, displacement and tarnished reputations. In the farming community, reputations are built over generations. All of that was destroyed in our community, for no reason.
If I were to go see my friend Éric Couvrette, as we walked toward his father's maple grove at the top of the hill, he would point to where his friend's house once stood and say that the federal government burned it down for evacuation drills, and then point to where his aunt's house once stood.
Then, walking towards the boundary, which ends in a cul-de-sac because there is an airport fence at the other end, there is a neighbour who is concerned about the quality of his water because of the chemicals that were used to burn down houses. He does not believe that the Montreal airports authority, or Aéroports de Montréal, is being transparent about its water analyses. This is my daily life as the representative for Mirabel.
When questioned by the Standing Committee on Finance this week, the Minister of Transport acknowledged that the federal government may have made “mistakes”. I strongly emphasize the word “mistakes”. Opened in 1975, the airport closed its doors to the public 30 years later, after much agony and three decades of broken lives. Three decades of broken lives is not nothing.
Of course, some land was returned. Brian Mulroney's government, apparently looking for government efficiencies, felt that it made no more sense for the federal government to own this land than for it to own Petro-Canada. It began to transfer land. It returned more than 80,000 acres. When entering the Union des producteurs agricoles building in Sainte-Scholastique, there is a portrait of Brian Mulroney on the wall. Not only do these people remember the bad, they also remember the good.
This continued under the Harper government because it kept 11,000 acres in case the airport were to expand. Other lands were returned and finally the last parcels of land were returned last year. There were five left, so the wound is still fairly raw. We have a duty to remember the people who were expropriated who are watching at home today, as well as those who are no longer with us but whose sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters are still around. The federal industry minister is one such person.
Battles were fought and lands were returned, but there has never been an apology. I think that these people deserve an apology from the federal government so that they can get closure. That is what the Quebec National Assembly unanimously called for in 2019 on the 50th anniversary of the expropriation. I also moved a motion to this effect last year, which was sponsored with the members for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie and Louis-Saint-Laurent—Akiawenhrahk. It was a motion without notice that the Liberal Party refused to have tabled, but it is never too late to do the right thing.
That is what revived the high-speed rail project. That is where it all started. Today, we are not talking about a train, but about justice. When we bring up what happened, the Minister of Transport tells me that I am dredging up the past to try to scare people. Can he blame people in my community for still being afraid? The people of Mirabel are people you can talk to. They are really compassionate people. They are people who are capable of listening and thinking, and I am sure they are capable of forgiving, but can anyone really blame them for their lack of confidence in the federal government after the hell they have experienced?
In the wake of those events, Canada adopted modern expropriation rules. It took its time, of course, but it got the job done, and now there is fairer compensation, the right to be listened to, the right to appeal and the right to be heard by a hearing officer before a minister can determine the value of the land. At the time, the government justified what it did in 1969, 1970 and 1971 on the grounds that nothing great would ever be done in Canada again without expropriation. It told us this awful treatment was necessary and that the project had to get done faster. People's lives were destroyed for decades just to speed up a project by a few months or a year.
There is a duty of reconciliation. It was all kind of personal for the former prime minister, and I understand that. It was a family thing. It was partly his father's legacy, in whose honour they renamed the Dorval airport, where people can at least watch planes fly. They say this is a new government. I want to believe them, but governments are judged by their actions.
People often talk about the financial cost of major projects. We are told that these projects are expensive, that they need to be fast-tracked and that they are generational investments. That may be true. In the case of the high-speed train project that reopened old wounds in my community, we believe it is a generational project, but there is very little mention of the human costs, of people being uprooted, of shattered lives. Very little is said about the impact, the scars it leaves. These scars are deeply human. It is the humble role of a private member to bring that humanity to the House and to make the House understand that Mirabel is today a place of remembrance for Quebec and for Canada. It reminds us, as we often say, that this could have happened to each and every one of us. It could have happened in each of our ridings. It could have happened in any one of our towns, and it could happen again.
The government has apologized many times. Prime Minister Trudeau apologized to many people and groups for mistakes made and crimes that should not have been committed, and rightly so. We agreed on that.
In Mirabel, every time a prime minister rises, makes amends and apologizes on behalf of the Crown to someone else while neglecting us, it reopens old wounds once again. While it will not heal them, I think that today we can come full circle historically by asking the government to apologize and not do it again.
I am sure that the government will be willing to do that, and I will be the first to invite it to my riding for that purpose. Where I come from, we are welcoming people.
Apologies put a stop to indifference. They show an openness to understanding, because unless people spend time with our constituents, they will not understand them. Apologies are like arms ready to open to people who have known nothing in life but pain, struggle, closed doors and politicians who make them feel invisible. Above all else, an apology is an acknowledgement of dignity. Apologizing, admitting to mistakes and starting fresh is one of the first lessons in civility that we teach our children. It is that important. Apologizing is part of life. We often forget that people asking for apologies are people waiting to offer forgiveness. They are people deeply motivated to prevent a 50-year battle from turning into a 100-year battle. People who demand an apology are people with no desire to fight just for the sake of fighting.
If this House or this government refuses to apologize to the people of Mirabel, they are not only refusing them an apology, they are depriving them of the opportunity to offer forgiveness in return. As the member for Mirabel, it is my profound belief that this is not the government's intention.