Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member from Taiaiako'n—Parkdale—High Park for sharing his time with me today.
I am surprised the Liberals have chosen to bring up space exploration today, given the fact that over the last week, we have seen the concrete pad out in Nova Scotia. I am sure we have all seen the picture by now. I want to thank Marie Lumsden from the Hamilton Examiner for the great article that has given me the information for this speech here today.
The Liberals are true to form. We have seen over and over again where they have worked very hard to enrich their friends. We have seen the clam scam. We have seen the ArriveCan app. We have seen the WE Charity scandal. We have seen the Chuck Rifici and the marijuana “pump and dump” schemes. We have seen the Brookfield stock go up over time. We have seen the green slush fund. We have seen the Randy Boissonnault scandal. We have seen this over and over again.
In the fallout of the news being reported around this gravel driveway and a concrete pad out in Nova Scotia, and a government contract for $200 million, the government decides this is the week we should be talking about space exploration, or participation in space. I am excited that Canada participates in space. I remember growing up being super proud of the Canadarm. Does everyone remember the Canadarm? I remember being excited about that, going to the Edmonton Space and Science Centre, watching the spacewalk on the IMAX and things like that, and also about the International Space Station and our participation in that.
The Liberals want us to talk about that today, about our Canadian participation, how we should be so proud that Canada participates in space and that we should have our own Cape Canaveral. What we saw in the news last week is no Cape Canaveral. It is a concrete pad.
Now, I poured a bit of concrete last summer, and I can say that concrete is pretty expensive by the cubic metre. It was about $300 a cubic metre back home. I can imagine that is a pretty expensive place, and the company is paying $13,500 a year to lease the land that this pad is on. We know that. I would give them a generous amount. I have paid a few contractors in my time for concrete as well, so I will be generous with it. Let us say some Caterpillar work was done there and some gravel trucks came and brought some gravel. It cost maybe $1 million. I think that is a pretty generous amount. Everybody made some good money building that pad.
The Canadian government could have done that. The Canadian government could have leased the land from the Nova Scotia government, spent $1 million and built the concrete pad. I think that would be an acceptable thing for us to have done, given that the Canadian government owns most of the airports in Canada. I do not know if everyone knows this, but most of the airports in Canada are owned by the Canadian government. Then private companies, generally not-for-profits, operate these places, and they pay the Canadian government for the operations.
Members can imagine being flabbergasted that this has been brought up here, that we are paying for the privilege of being able to maybe one day use this concrete pad to launch a rocket somewhere. We are paying $20 million a year for the privilege of maybe being able to use that concrete pad. That is not all. The Liberals really know how to make their friends happy: by backdating this contract a whole year and paying them back an entire year. Marie Lumsden looked into some of the people involved. Lo and behold, a Liberal premier is on the board of directors of this company. Wow, look at that, Liberals feeding their friends. Members may think that is kind of interesting. There is a partnership. All of this was brought up by the partnership from—