Scott Reid

Mr. Speaker, I am presenting a petition. It is the first petition of what I believe will be many on the subject of the Alto high-speed rail project. There is currently an online petition with, at this point, over 10,000 signatures, and I know other print petitions are circulating. The petitioners draw the House's attention to the fact that the cost of this project will be as much as $90 billion, [more]

Mr. Speaker, I think the answer is that those are projects that would actually generate expansion to the GDP, because we would be exporting product, whereas this is not going to achieve that goal.

Mr. Speaker, in the end, the cost is going to be zero, because there is no way that this insane project is actually going to make its way through. We do not have the money to spend $90 billion, which is the estimate. We do not have the money for that. We will spend $3 billion or $4 billion, do a series of expropriations and destroy lives, and then, like the Pickering airport, it will be shut [more]

Mr. Speaker, I lack the expertise to give an intelligent response to that question, which is clearly designed just to divert me from the issue of this mind-blowingly expensive project that would destroy lives, ruin property rights and ruin communities that I represent. It would destroy people's lives. That is what is at stake here. The costs of this would be just insane for every single Canadian, [more]

Mr. Speaker, today I am going to be talking about two themes: the first is property rights and the second is the economics of the Alto project. My comments on both are in the context of the part of the budget implementation act that deals with the proposed high-speed rail network and the Alto train, which would run 1,000 kilometres from Quebec City to Toronto at a cost estimate of $60 billion to [more]