Mr. Speaker, today, we are here to discuss and debate a motion that reads as follows, and I will read it in French.
That the House call on the government to take the appropriate measures to sell the 11,000 acres of arable land back to the families and farmers whose land was expropriated to build the Mirabel Airport.
It was near Mirabel that I learned the French language. During the 1980s, I lived in Saint-Antoine, very close to Mirabel. I worked in a Giant Tiger store in Saint-Jérôme, east of Mirabel.
It is difficult, for people who do not know this area of Quebec, to realize how big this airport is.
To folks who are not from that area and who mostly speak English, I will try to describe a bit of this. I will tell them about an experience I had when I made a wrong turn one time. I was returning from Laval. I got off the autoroute at the wrong spot and wound up driving on to the territory of Mirabel. I drove down this road through the middle of an absolutely empty countryside for a good 10, 12, maybe 15 minutes. I finally got to the airport. I was able to turn around at that point and drive all the way back to get on to the autoroute to continue on home.
This is an area that has been completely depopulated. It is two-thirds the size of the sovereign country of Singapore, two-thirds the size of an independent country with several million people. It is completely depopulated as a result of a cabinet decision that was made in 1969 and followed through by the cabinet in 1971, even after it realized it was wrong.
I will be splitting my time, Mr. Speaker.
There were 88,000 acres expropriated, as I say, two-thirds the size of the sovereign country of Singapore, and 3,200 families were forced to move as a result of that expropriation. Only 5,000 acres were used for the airport. As one of my hon. colleagues from the New Democratic Party has pointed out, that is a larger amount of land than is used for Heathrow Airport, the largest and busiest airport in the world. Mirabel has tens of thousands of additional acres that continue not to be used.
As early as January 1971, the Liberal cabinet knew that 22,000 of those acres were not required for the purposes of the airport under any imaginable scenario. Rather than face the public relations embarrassment of having to retract that expropriation, it continued on and depopulated the area of a further 1,700 people who did not need to be moved, but who were forcibly moved to avoid a public relations embarrassment. That is an absolutely astonishing thing to do.
However, this is typical of the attitude that has been taken by that government and by Liberal governments since that time toward private property owners, or even by Liberal governments before that time. After all, it was a Liberal government that in the 1940s that not only rounded up and interned the Japanese Canadians in camps in the interior of B.C. and in other places like Saskatchewan. It also then took their property from them, expropriated it, auctioned it off and then charged the costs of the auctioning against the value of the property. This is the attitude that this government and Liberal governments historically have had toward the private property rights of Canadians.
It seems to me that there are things we could do about this. It is this principled approach that I want to talk about today. It seems to me that we could, as a country, make a decision to ensure that when property is taken by government for a public purpose, adequate compensation is paid. There is no reason why governments should not, when they sense a need, be able to take property from private citizens, as long as compensation is given, compensation that meets certain qualifications. It has to be full compensation. It ought to be timely compensation and it ought to be just compensation.
It is in this spirit that last week I introduced a private member's bill, Bill C-279, which would have the effect of ensuring that the 1960 bill of rights be amended to ensure that no property can be taken unless full, just and timely compensation is given. For greater surety, I have added we want to ensure that the use and enjoyment of property cannot be taken away without full, just and timely compensation.
We could, in this chamber, make the decision to put that law into effect. If that had been done prior to the beginning of the expropriations in 1969, it would be families would not have been deprived of their property in such an unjust and unfair manner. Indeed, because it would have had to pay the full price for these lands, the government would have been much more circumspect about taking these lands.
As we know, there were considerable pressures from within the cabinet as to the expenses involved in this expropriation. Had those expenses reflected the full cost to the community instead of being imposed on the community, I suggest the government would not have taken all those additional acres, which it knew as of 1971 it did not actually need. The public relations headache, by admitting that it had made a mistake, would have been outweighed by the financial considerations of having to pay the cost of its own actions. That is the value of property rights.
I want to talk for just a moment about some other examples of the kinds of property rights abuses that we see from governments, both federal and provincial, toward Canadian citizens and particularly toward rural Canadians who have so much of their livelihood and well-being tied up in the ownership, use and enjoyment of land.
Zoning laws can have the effect of reducing the use and enjoyment of property, effectively taking away some of the value of property. Environmental laws relating to buffer zones around water courses, for example, and restrictions on the grazing of animals on property can have the effect of reducing the value of that property. That can amount to a de facto expropriation.
Acts, like the Species at Risk Act, which we passed in the House of Commons without adequate compensation provisions for property owners, can have the effect of depriving people of some of the use and enjoyment of their property. That, again, can amount to a de facto confiscation.
The regulations that some provinces, including my own, have passed regarding water filtration requirements can have the effect of causing community halls to be unable to open because they cannot provide the expense of putting in these filtration systems. I have seen this in my own constituency.
All these are effectively restrictions on the value of property without actually taking that property away. That is both unjustifiable and very damaging to the health of our rural communities.
The example that occurred in Mirabel is merely the largest and, if we like, the purest example of this kind of abuse of private property rights. It is not always the case, and it was not the case with those extra acres at Mirabel, but as a rule there is a legitimate public justification for what is being done. I do not think anybody would object to the goal of trying to protect quality in our water courses. I do not think anyone would object, on principle, to the idea of trying to preserve species at risk. Quite the contrary. However, it does seem reasonable that when we take a measure, we ought to accept that we as a government should agree to pay for the cost instead of imposing that cost on the private citizens who have the misfortune to be standing in the way of that public policy.
This respect for their property and their rights ensures that we will see good husbandry of the environment and respect for the law by those who are being affected by these laws.When people know their properties are likely to be confiscated from them or reduced in their value to them, they will try to protect themselves if there is no compensation. However, if the government finds that they have endangered species on their properties, they are far more likely to do what they can to ensure the survival of those species if they know it will not result in their own financial ruin.
I can actually cite an example from Montague Township, in my constituency, where species at risk legislation had the effect of causing someone to lose some of the use of his property. Therefore, he could not subdivide a lot, could not finance his mortgage and he lost his property. Had that property owner known what was coming, I suspect he would have gone out and destroyed the nesting sites of the loggerhead shrike rather than see the loggerhead shrike survive and he lose his property. This kind of thing happens when one does not have respect for property rights.
This is understood in many countries. It is understood, for example, in some countries in Africa, which have had great success by respecting the property rights of local villagers, of their turning their local elephant populations into an asset for them rather into a resource, which is protected at their expense. The result is the countries which have had that kind of respect for property rights have increased elephant populations. We can look around the world at many places for these examples.
