Mr. Speaker, the motion is about more than an airport. It is about unlocking the creative power of the entrepreneurial spirit for the betterment of our people.
Entrepreneurship is nothing new in Canada. It built our economy. The lumberjacks of the Ottawa Valley who harvested the wood were entrepreneurs. So, too, were the craftsmen who turned it into farming implements and timber-framed barns. The wood from these barns is ironically more popular today than ever before. Trendy coffee shops, restaurants, and new homes use it as veneers, flooring, and decorative beams.
If one types the words “vintage wood” into house.com, a popular home design website, one will find 37,000 pictures of recycled products that are used in the most beautiful ways, and it is not cheap. It can go for $10 a foot. That is more expensive than many engineered hardwood floors. A few years ago, this wood was an abandoned barn that was no longer good enough to house cattle and was left as a home for rats and pigeons.
Why is it suddenly worth so much? The wood's value is in the story it tells.
A big piece of an old barn beam now on my fireplace mantle has axe marks that tell of a logger who cut it and squared it. Its mortises and tenons tell of the craftsman who joined it into a building frame that held for over 100 years. The rusted nails and the boards remind us of the calloused hands of the 19th century Lanark farmer who pounded it into a barn and his descendants who worked in it for generations thereafter. That is the story people buy when they purchase this reclaimed wood.
The modern-day story of recycling that wood is also the story of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs like Tim Priddle, one of the owners of The Wood Source in my riding, have taken the material that would otherwise decompose into a decrepit and condemned barn and have created something beautiful that makes people happy and connects them to their past. This is the triumph of free enterprise and it is part of a $36-billion second-hand economy, according to a report sponsored by Kijiji just last week.
Recently, The Wood Source expanded and invited the community for a tour of its facility, where I learned the tale of two buildings.
One was built 40 years ago. Back then, the government required a one-page drawing, stamped by an engineer, and a one-page application. Then it was done, approved, and ready to build.
If members think that is not safe, the building is still standing and in use today, decades later.
About six years ago, The Wood Source applied to build another workshop, roughly the same size and dimensions. It took 1,500 pages of applications and $600,000 in fees, reports, and professional consultants. He had to hire an arborist to write a report on each tree being removed, including the size and the species, these trees being on a few acres of otherwise useless brush. They even made it pay a fee for the loss of parkland, even though the land had never been a park. One would think it was a pulp mill and not a lumber mill because half the cost of building it was paper costs. In fact, with the money he spent on paperwork, Tim could have hired another 10 employees for a year.
Then comes the electricity costs. In the last five years, it has gone from $3,200 a month to $9,000 a month. That is $70,000 a year in increases, which is enough to hire yet another talented employee. Much of the increase pays for subsidies the government imposes for wind turbines and solar panels, which produce only a minute fraction of Ontario's electricity, despite billions of dollars in subsidies that consumers like Tim must shoulder.
He complained of these costs to his local Liberal minister, who said that he would put him in touch with some people in his office who could help him with various grant programs that might be available. Why not just let Tim keep his own money? The answer is that there would be no place for the Liberal minister. If we just let people succeed through their own hard work, that minister would not be so important. The entrepreneur would not need to come back, asking him for his money.
President Reagan used to say that the Liberals would tax anything that moved. If it kept moving, they would regulate it. When it finally stopped moving, they subsidized it.
Such is the case with Bombardier and the Toronto island airport. The airport's runway is too short to land Bombardier C Series jets. A 400-metre expansion of that runway would solve that problem and would result in Porter purchasing $2 billion worth of Bombardier planes to land there. Yet, in a tweet sent out only weeks after taking office, the transport minister announced that he was blocking this infrastructure project without any public rationale whatsoever.
The result is that the government is blocking a massive infrastructure project at the same time as it plunges the country into deficit to fund infrastructure projects. It is blocking $124 million in economic growth in Toronto while spending billions of dollars of borrowed money, ostensibly to stimulate economic growth. It is blocking $55 million in newly generated tax revenues while increasing taxes to get more revenue. It is blocking $2 billion in additional sales for Bombardier C Series planes and then proposing $2 billion in federal-provincial bailouts for Bombardier.
It is blocking business people from landing in Toronto's business district, which puts more cars on the road between Pearson airport and downtown. Then the government says that it needs to spend more money to relieve traffic gridlock. It has done this to protect the privileges of the wealthiest 1% with waterfront homes near the island airport, at the expense of middle-class workers who miss out on the jobs, middle-class passengers who get less choice, and middle-class taxpayers who bear the cost.
Elsewhere, the government pledged to raise taxes on start-ups by doubling the tax on stock options. However, it plans to simultaneously subsidize start-ups with taxpayers' money. Or, they add a nine-month delay to an already 18-month approval process for a pipeline that will carry western Canadian oil to eastern Canadian refineries. Selling Canadian oil to Canadians means we do not have to accept a discount from Americans. As former energy entrepreneur, Gwyn Morgan, wrote this week, this discount currently amounts to $10 a barrel, meaning that we forfeit $38 million every day. That means that a $250-million injection from the federal stabilization fund announced by the Prime Minister on his recent visit to Alberta would not even offset one week of market access losses.
The pattern is this. The government is standing in the way of entrepreneurial opportunity. It is blocking development. It is holding back the spirit that helped to build this country from the time of the settlers who built the barns that I spoke of earlier. Seeing back allows us to see forward.
I know that trends in interior design come and go, but the popularity of this timeless old wood, and the story it tells, gives me hope that Canadians remain committed to the same common sense, ingenuity, and work ethic that make our country great. I believe that the government, with time, will be forced to reconsider its decision to block this important economic opportunity for the people of Toronto and the people of Canada. When it does, entrepreneurs will celebrate, the middle class will celebrate, our aviation sector will celebrate, and all the people of this land who love to visit Canada's biggest city by landing in the heart of the downtown district will also celebrate. I look forward to celebrating with them.
