Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor of C2C Journal
The Constitution doesn’t guarantee property rights. Canadians clearly suffer from the omission
Why do governments exist? According to 17th-century English philosopher John Locke, the state’s purpose comes down to one thing: protecting your stuff. “The great and chief end … of Mens … putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property,” Locke wrote in 1690.
By this most basic measure of competence, Canadian governments are failing miserably — nowhere more clearly than in Richmond, B.C., where a recent court ruling has upended the security of fee simple tenure. With aboriginal title now declared to be a “senior and prior interest” to fee simple, local homeowners are panicking. No less than the Wall Street Journal recently asked: “Do Property Rights Still Exist in British Columbia?”
Yet it’s not as if Canadian governments were doing a great job of fulfilling Locke’s prime directive before this ruling. It’s merely the latest and most glaring example of the devastating decline of Canadian property rights. As governments increasingly embrace communitarian or social-democratic principles, people’s ability to control what happens to their land and possessions is steadily being eroded.
Where does the blame for this lie? A good place to start is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that alleged protector of all our fundamental rights.
Scan the constitutions of the world’s liberal democracies and you generally find a list of specific freedoms guaranteed to all citizens: freedom of speech, religious belief, association and assembly and, in most places, both the right to own property, as well as protection against its unlawful seizure. But not in Canada. Our Charter is silent on property rights. “It certainly makes us an outlier,” says University of Saskatchewan constitutional lawyer Dwight Newman in an interview.
Among the 38 OECD nations, only Canada and New Zealand lack explicit constitutional protection for property rights. This omission is a relatively recent development. In 1960 prime minister John Diefenbaker’s Bill of Rights enshrined in federal legislation the “right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law.” Such overt protection disappeared in 1982 with the advent of the Charter.
Read the article at Financial Times: Property rights in Canada are in decline | Financial Post
OR view the PDF below: