moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should initiate an amendment to section 7 of the Constitution Act, 1982, to recognize the right of the individual to enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.
Mr. Speaker, it gives me a great deal of pleasure to rise in the Chamber to move that in the opinion of this House the government should initiate an amendment to section 7 of the Constitution Act, 1982, to recognize the right of the individual to enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice. Nothing is more important to a system of government than this.
In rising in this Chamber today I am following many people of greater stature and ability than myself who have fought for this most fundamental right. I follow, however unworthily, in the footsteps of those who have made the glorious revolution. I follow in the footsteps of those who confronted King John and compelled him to sign the Magna Carta. I follow in the footsteps of those who for 1,000 years or more have worked and when necessary have fought and died to ensure that governments serve the rights of their citizens rather than oppress them.
I intend to continue the fight for property rights, the core of our ancient liberties. Since this is not how most people understand the concept of property rights, I have three primary purposes in my remarks today. First, I would like to begin by explaining what property rights really are. Second, I would like to outline why they are central to the problem of good government. Then I would like to explain how my motion would address that problem.
Property rights begin with the concept of self-ownership. It is vital to stress this point because when people hear the term property they generally think of real property: houses, boats, mansions and yachts. They generally think not just of real property, but of real property of a luxurious nature. They think of property rights as protecting the rich, or as protecting the existing order of things. This is fundamentally and entirely wrong.
The essence of property rights is the concept of self-ownership, of the individual's conscience and the individual's judgment as inviolable, even sacred. People have the right to make their own decisions. That is my most fundamental belief.
Our property is ourselves, our labour, our imagination and our courage. The right to control one's own actions is what property rights is all about. Only by extension is property material.
In a universe of material things and in a universe in which time passes, a respect for self-ownership of others must mean a respect for the things they make or modify. Property does mean things too, but fundamentally, the right to own property is a right to own oneself, to make one's own decisions, to trade voluntarily with others, to labour freely and for oneself and not for others as a slave.
It is therefore profoundly mistaken to believe that property rights favour the rich. Take half of a rich man's things and he will still be well off, but take half of a poor man's or a middle class man's things away and what hope do they have of one day being comfortable?
It is also unsound to say that one can be free without ownership of the things one makes with one's labour. It is unsound to contrast mere material things with higher matters such as love. However bright the eye of a beloved child, food, clothing and shelter are essential to that child, but they are not the end of that child's material needs. It is not a case of satisfying material needs and then moving to a higher plateau. Toys, games, books and the very arms with which a parent hugs a child are all material. No parent who cannot make a thing and keep it or trade it for another, whether simple food or a book of poetry can express their love effectively and freely.
The right of self-ownership is fundamental. It must imply the right to control the material things that one owns, makes or alters. However, its origin is in self-ownership: the ownership of ourselves, our labour and our imagination.
Those who deny the right to own property, deny not the right of the exploiter to hoard, but the right of the ordinary citizen to live according to his or her own lights. That right is fundamental to human dignity.
That brings me to my second point, the problem of good government. However sound the right of self-ownership may be in abstract theory, it is threatened in practice from two directions.
People may be subject to force and fraud from within their own community. Their rights may be insecure either in theory or in practice, if theft is legal or if it is unpunished. If that is the case, nothing we may do to make the world a better place as we understand it can persist. Whatever is achieved is snatched away. Then whatever a person may dream will be only a dream. It will never be realized.
People may be subjected to force and fraud from outside. Whatever system of rights they possess, an attack from outside may overwhelm that system and leave them raped and murdered in their burning houses. Whatever they have achieved may be taken away this way also.
Therefore people combine into societies and create governments. Through them they seek to define a system of rights and enforce it internally and also protect the system as a whole from attack from the outside. Sometimes they fail and if they do the results are clearly catastrophic. A government too weak to protect the lives, liberty and property of its citizens is unbearable, but the usual problem is quite the reverse.
Through most of human history the problem has been that governments wield too much power. The usual result of having a government too weak to protect people's rights is to have it displaced by one strong enough to do it, but unwilling to.
The historical problem is that governments have had the ability to protect citizens but not the will. Instead, they themselves have taken these rights away. What they have done is to treat citizens as means and not ends. They declare some higher purpose and then force citizens to seek to fulfil it, whatever it may be.
In most parts of the world the problem of government quite simply has never been solved. The Romans considered it. "Quis custodiet custodientes?" they asked. Who shall guard the guardians? But they did not solve it.
In the Anglo-American tradition it was solved, if imperfectly. The solution was partly theoretical and partly practical, but the larger and more impersonal societies and governments became the more important, the theory was. In Britain the Anglo-Saxon councils seemed somehow to have solved the problem of government, to give chiefs and leaders some power but not too much. They could defend rights but not take them away.
After the Norman conquest it seemed that government had triumphed over society, but it had not. At swordpoint at Runnymede, civil society told King John he would sign the Magna Carta or he would die and it told him he would abide by it or he would die.
When the Stuarts sought to shake free of it the people revolted. Charles I lost his head over it, literally. When Oliver Cromwell sought to use power to engage in social engineering, the people withdrew their consent to be governed. Shortly after his death the Commonwealth was abolished.
The monarchy was brought back under strictly limited terms after James II showed he would not keep the bargain. The glorious revolution brought William and Mary to the throne but also the 1689 Bill of Rights. Again the right of the citizen to be free from his or her own government triumphed.
Governments, however, have a real tendency to encroach. The guardians must be guarded. It was that which led to the revolt in the 13 colonies in the 1770s. It was the danger of another revolt that led to the Durham report urging self-government in this country. For most of our history the common law and its protection of the right to own property withstood any attempt to undermine it.
Unfortunately what wise men create clever men can undo. And so it was here. The Right Hon. Pierre Elliot Trudeau neither fully understood nor cared much about the notion of citizens as ends rather than means, nor did he understand or sympathize with the British parliamentary tradition and the supremacy of common law.
In 1982, quite casually, he traded away our most fundamental right in a slick and clever political calculation, but he should not have done it. Since 1982 things have gone downhill very fast in this country. Since 1982 we have somehow had the idea that government is the master and the citizen is the servant.
Mr. Trudeau felt very clever because he had reached agreement with the premiers to have the Constitution repatriated. However, when one level of government agrees with another to abolish citizens' protection against government, a protection 1,000 years old or more, it is not good and it is not wise. Therefore, I want this House to take steps to restore it to the Constitution.
The Canadian people were denied a chance to vote on property rights in 1982 when the Constitution was repatriated. Nobody asked them. They were denied it again in 1992 when the right to own property was deliberately omitted from the Charlottetown accord, against the wishes of the Canadian people I might add. They have been denied it here because hon. members opposite have denied the House a chance to vote on this motion, to stand up and be counted with the Commons or with bad King John. However, it is time we restored it.
What I am proposing is very precise, that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be amended to include the following:
The federal government shall take no property from any citizen, in whole or in part, through eminent domain, regulation, or any other way, except for public use, through due process and with just and timely compensation.
This does not encroach on provincial jurisdiction. It only binds the federal government. It does not paralyse public policy. It only holds it to a reasonable standard of serving the public and not abusing it. It does not forbid takings. It only insists that they must be done in a legitimate way and for a legitimate purpose.
What it does do is admit the existence of the paradox of government and to seek to apply the solution of wise men to the problems created by those who were merely clever. It seeks to restore government to its proper function: protecting the rights of citizens, not usurping them, not taking them away.
The most important of these rights is the right to own property. That right is the right to own oneself, to be a free person and not a slave. I therefore urge this House to express itself in favour of the entrenchment of the right to own private property in the Constitution.
Many of my colleagues will have an opportunity to speak to this motion today but many others will not. It is an additional unfortunate consequence of being denied votable status that the time for debate is drastically restricted.
Those of my colleagues who would like to speak but cannot have therefore asked me to read into the record a statement of their support. On behalf of the members for Calgary Northeast, Lethbridge, Mission-Coquitlam, Prince George-Peace River, Port Moody-Coquitlam, Prince George-Bulkley Valley, Vegreville and Wetaskiwin, I would like to conclude with this statement:
"Mr. Speaker, hon. colleagues and fellow Canadians, we believe the right to own property and not to be deprived thereof, except for public use, through due process and with just compensation is at the core of Canadians' ancient liberties as free people. Each of us would like to be able to rise in the Chamber today to voice our support for the entrenchment of that right in the Constitution. In case we do not have that opportunity today, we have asked our colleague, the member for Skeena, to place this statement of our support for this measure into the record".
I hope that all members of whatever party in this House will share and endorse that sentiment. This is most emphatically not a partisan issue but a matter of fundamental justice and human rights.