Property Rights

[parsley]

Tend your farm ownership rights. Carefully.


http://www.edmontonsun.com/2012/05/14/alberta-
weakest-in-canada

[ASRG]

1999, the Manitoba Court of Appeal upheld the constitutionality of the Canadian Wheat Board. In their decision, the judges said Ottawa could force Prairie farmers to sell their grain only to the board because “The right to 'enjoyment of property' is not a constitutionally protected, fundamental part of Canadian society.”

It seemed a preposterous statement from a Canadian court. If nothing else, Canadians inherited 800 years of common-law protection of personal property through our British legal heritage.

But while ideologically mistaken, the Manitoba court wasn’t legally wrong. For nearly 80 years, governments and courts in Canada have been chipping away at property rights in the name of the “common good.” Now there are almost no limits on governments’ ability to confiscate your land or to dictate to you how you may use your land, even if the government-approved uses reduce the value of your land.

And while every province has legal guidelines dictating what compensation must be paid for expropriated land, any government wanting to avoid paying merely needs to state that it will not pay in the bill authorizing the confiscation.Then it’s off the hook.

As a new book by Calgary researcher Mark Milke points out, the situation here has become so dire that “Canada now has the weakest property rights among Western countries.”

“Unlike Europe, where governments of all stripes compensate private property owners when regulation acts as de facto expropriation, governments in Canada can wholly or partly freeze your property through regulation and not offer a dime in compensation,” says Milke, who is the director of Alberta policy research for the Fraser Institute and author of Stealth Confiscation: How Governments Regulate, Freeze, and Devalue Private Property.

Milke cites several examples of what he means, among them a little-known West Coast case that should receive broader attention (and outrage).

In 2000, the City of Vancouver ordered the CPR to maintain as a public park a 22-kilometre stretch of abandoned right-of-way. It prevented the railway from selling the land or redeveloping for any other use – such as condo construction. And it added it would not pay for the tens of millions (hundreds of millions?) of lost land value.

In 2006, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld the city’s land grab, declaring that the alleged moral superiority of the city’s public purpose for the land trumped the landowner’s right to use or sell the land as it saw fit.

So if that – and many other examples cited by Milke – give Canada the weakest property rights in the Western world, then Alberta must have the weakest of any province in this weak country.

Over the past three years – first with Alison Redford as minister of Justice and now as premier – the Alberta Tory government has passed four laws (Bills 19, 24, 36 and 50) that give the provincial cabinet almost unlimited power to tell landowners how they may use their property or force them to surrender it to government or a big corporation – such as a utility. The quartet of laws also sets out the tiny compensation the province or company must pay and gives affected landowners almost no recourse to the courts if they believe the cheque is inadequate.

These are as arbitrary as any property laws in Western democracies.

So what does Milke propose?

“Some regulation is a reality,” he admits. “But Sweden, Finland, Germany, Holland and others treat private property owners much more fairly, providing compensation for the effect of regulation on property values.” Owners are paid not just when governments take their land but also when, for instance, governments diminish the value of the land by declaring it an environmentally protected site.

lorne.gunter@sunmedia.ca

[blackpowder]

It is good to see more people realizing these facts. We've been reminded of our 'different' rights often, but only when it affects us directly. Firearms bills of the 90s are examples. Property rights are not protected in our constitution.
I can hear Trudeau rattling his chains with laughter.

[ASRG]

Actually Trudeau wanted to entrench property rights? It was the provinces who balked......including Peter Lougheed! Look it up.