Thank you Mr. Speaker. Quite often, the questions we get later on come from the people who did not listen. Then they ask us about things that we repeated about 15 times during our speech.
Before I continue, I should mention that I will be sharing my time with my esteemed colleague from Gaspésie—Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine—Listuguj.
Now let us briefly discuss a few points. We know that the proposed route, even though it is not final, will result in the expropriation of land belonging to Mirabel families who, in many cases, are still affected by the brutal expropriations that took place during the construction of Mirabel Airport in 1969. We are talking about more than 3,000 families whose land was expropriated, and the government did not even use all of the expropriated land. Some are seeing their former properties taken away a second time. Most of these people had to leave the region and uproot themselves to rebuild their lives elsewhere.
Despite its direct responsibility, Ottawa has never been willing to apologize to the people of Mirabel. There have been apologies outside of Parliament, it is true. The late Marc Garneau, may he rest in peace, offered one in 2019, outside the House. However, there has never been an institutional apology from the House to those whose lives were completely turned upside down.
The government is presenting the consultation process as a gesture of courtesy. It is in no way related to citizens' grievances. The government is saying that a public consultation is under way. However, new dates are supposed to be scheduled in Mirabel. Do we have those dates yet? I do not know. If someone across the aisle has the answer, I would be very open to hearing it during questions and comments.
One of the things we have heard repeatedly in the speeches so far is that things have to move quickly. Things always have to move quickly. They have to move very quickly. That is exactly what happened in 1969. Things moved too quickly for something that was not worth it, for a project that was a blatant failure and for which we are still paying the price today. There are still families who have been affected by this.
Sometimes people tell us that all that is in the past, that it is history. We heard that when we proposed our motion on the events of October 1970 back in 2020. We heard it last week when we asked questions about the Prime Minister's speech on the Plains of Abraham. We were told that we were living in the past. What interests them are jobs, the economy, social services, Canadians' rights and so on. However, they are the ones who chose to give a speech on history. They talk about history, pick it up and dust it off when it suits them, but the last thing they want is for us to talk about it.
I asked my colleague from Saint-Jean a trick question earlier. I asked her what would happen if, in her former life as a lawyer, someone had come into her office and said he or she had been the victim of some situation or other some years back, only to have my colleague tell that person to stop living in the past and move on. She answered that she would have been disbarred. The same is true here, in this case.
There is something else we often hear as well. We are told that over the past 60 years, an entire consultation system has been built. In Quebec, there is the well-known Bureau d'audiences publiques sur l'environnement, or BAPE, which does exceptional work. A whole consultation framework has been established, which means projects can no longer simply be imposed or pushed through while ignoring people's wishes.
Let us not forget that during the last week of the parliamentary session in June—when people were suffering through a heat wave, when the bravest among them were still firing up the barbecue or heading to the pool, and when almost no one was interested in politics while we here were suffocating in our jackets and ties—we were hit by a super closure motion to ram through a bill allowing numerous laws to be suspended, including, in some cases, provisions of the Criminal Code, and giving developers the ability to sit down in a minister's office and push through a project without having to obtain the public's approval. That was Bill C‑5, which was passed with the support of the official opposition, who supported not only the bill itself, but also the super closure motion. Now we are being told that we life needs to move fast, and we are going to fast-track the need to fast-track. That is exactly what happened at that time, when political attention was at its lowest.
That is not acceptable to us. No, that does nothing to reassure us. We will certainly not take comfort in the fact that Bill C‑15, the 2025 budget implementation bill, will allow the government, and Alto by extension, to circumvent the provisions of the Expropriation Act.
It is incorrect to say that the federal law is the same as the Quebec law, because several provisions of the Quebec law, including the right to challenge and the compensation mechanism, are not the same. It is obvious that the hasty expropriations and the interprovincial nature of the project will allow Ottawa to circumvent Quebec's laws and regulations by bringing the issues under federal jurisdiction. Quebec does not have exclusive jurisdiction when the project is not entirely within its borders.
Earlier, we were told about disinformation coming from the Bloc Québécois. I heard a lot more disinformation from the other side when they claimed that the Bloc Québécois is against the high-speed train, which is a lie. Nothing could be further from the truth. Social licence for projects also means taking into account the experiences of local populations and their socio-historical relationship to the land, whether they are Quebeckers or indigenous people.
I am from Saint‑Hyacinthe, but I am rising this evening to talk about Mirabel because it concerns Quebec, and what happens in one corner of Quebec affects Quebec as a whole. Since Ottawa has given itself disproportionate powers under Bill C-5 and Bill C-15, we do not want the feds to repeat the Mirabel fiasco in other projects.
What we are doing today with our opposition day motion is not just correcting a mistake from the past, because it can never be corrected. It is not just to protect the people of Mirabel, but to protect all Quebeckers. If Ottawa was able to traumatize an entire region in 1969 without the carte blanche it now has because of Bill C-5 and will soon have because of Bill C-15, imagine what it will be able to do when this comes into effect.
