Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where property rights are even more up in the air, Mark Carney is pitching a big tent, and we are the home of temperance-themed virtue signaling. Cheers!
Just two days after my article in The Free Press, “This Land Is Not Your Land,” warned that Canada has plunged into uncertainty about property rights because of a ruling by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, a separate court ruling on the other side of the country seemed to underline the point.
In British Columbia, a judge said in August that the Cowichan Tribes had established aboriginal title over a vast “black zone,” ruling that constitutionally protected aboriginal title is superior to fee simple property rights. Thursday’s ruling by the New Brunswick Court of Appeal confirmed the depth of the uncertainty and showed where Canada’s courts might ultimately draw the line between current property owners and indigenous groups who lived on the same land long ago.
