Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to hear every speaker getting my riding name right since we returned. They must have spent the summer practising.
I suspect that in her remarks earlier the parliamentary secretary was making a speech that must have been written with the intention of being used on my private member's Bill C-279 rather than on this motion because she made references to the Canadian Bill of Rights. I proposed a lot of that effect and unfortunately she only seemed to have a passing familiarity with the motion before the House today.
I want to talk a little about the overarching theme of property rights that is contained in both the motion before the House today and in the bill that I proposed.
Let me start by going back in history to December 7, 1941, which is the day on which the imperial Japanese navy launched a simultaneous attack on British and American forces in the Pacific. As a result of this, both Canadians and Americans found themselves at war with Japan and both countries at that time contained large populations of naturalized and second generation citizens of Japanese origin, most living on the Pacific coast and working largely as fishermen.
Given the fear of coastal attacks, the white majority in both countries responded with what one author has described as “near-identical racism to the perceived security threat posed by the Japanese minorities”.
As a result of this, in February 1942 these mostly patriotic Canadian and American citizens were rounded up and shipped to internment camps in the interior. In their absence, their properties, including their fishing vessels, were in many cases seized without their consent. Naturally, some of the internees sought legal remedies to the outrageous manner in which their rights had been violated. In Canada, which had no bill of rights at that time, their appeals were rejected by the courts and the policy banning these citizens from returning to the west coast remained in effect until 1949.
In the United States, the cases eventually made their way to the supreme court which ruled in 1944 that the wartime internment of American citizens without proof of anti-government activity or treasonable sentiment was a justifiable use of the state power. This ruling has made some people comment that in times of crisis the bill of rights cannot be relied upon to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
However what is forgotten and what is relevant to today's debate is that this same court also ruled, at a time when war was still raging with the Japanese empire and when that empire seemed years from defeat, that it was not permissible for the American government to take away their property and sell it compulsorily. In Canada, by contrast, seized property was sold for a fraction of its value without regard to the protests of former owners. To add insult to injury, deductions were made for sales costs and taxes.
In a comparison of the treatment of the Japanese on the other side of the border, historian Roger Daniels concluded that it was “the American constitution, with its tradition of judicial review, which was largely responsible” for the less uncivilized behaviour of the American authorities.
I have related this story because I believe there are a number of vital services that can be provided by a well written, well interpreted bill of rights or charter of rights and, in particular of course, in protecting people and their property rights. Here is a clear demonstration of how this works and how it could have worked in Canada. This is the kind of benefit we could see if property rights were protected in a bill of rights.
Of course there are other ways of going about dealing with protecting property rights. We could do it through the Charter of Rights and other levels of government could pass ordinary legislation.
This has been a critical part of my own political career. I wrote the property rights policy that was adopted by the old Reform Party in the 1990s. I was active in causing the new Conservative Party to adopt a version of this policy at its most recent policy convention in March. I was happy to assist the hon. member for Yorkton—Melville when he was drafting his motion several months ago. Actually, I withdrew an item of my own from the Order Paper back in April so that he could start the process of bringing this very important issue before the House, and thank goodness he has done so.
Finally, of course, I introduced a private member's bill of my own, Bill C-279, which seeks to entrench property rights in a meaningful form in Canadian law. I will just talk for a minute about Bill C-279 before returning to the motion at hand.
Bill C-279 seeks to add teeth to the property protection provisions of John Diefenbaker's legislated Canadian Bill of Rights which was enacted in 1960. The Canadian Bill of Rights is not a constitutional document, unlike the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and it only affects federal legislation, which means that it would not affect a number of the areas that were dealt with by my hon. colleague from Durham moments ago. However it does set up a pattern for the kind of behaviour we would like to see and it also deals with federal regulations that intrude on the lives of ordinary Canadians.
The Bill of Rights contains a property provision right now, but it does not prohibit any limitations on how governments may abridge property rights. Bill C-279 seeks to correct this by altering the word of the relevant section of the Bill of Rights to read as follows:
(a) the right of the individual to life, liberty, security of the person and enjoyment and use of property, and the right not to be deprived thereof except by due process of law, and, in the case of property, without full, just and timely compensation;
This is the whole point of the exercise. Neither I, nor the member for Yorkton—Melville, nor anybody else in the House who is speaking in favour of property rights, is trying to take away any power from the government. We are not attempting to say that governments cannot pass laws in favour of public safety, protection of the environment, zoning or taking over pieces of property for military use. We are not trying to invade on the government's right to create new bankruptcy laws which was the particularly unusual example cited by the parliamentary secretary.
We are trying to ensure that when these actions occur, for example, when the use of land is restricted because of the need to protect an endangered species because of unusual environmental situations, that the cost to the landowner of the change in use of that land is compensated in some way. There is no reason why the government cannot do this, except of course that there might be an additional cause.
This is the usual argument that tends to come up and the parliamentary secretary raised this objection earlier. Essentially, if we stop downloading the costs of new laws, and I will take environmental laws as an example, onto a specific group such as farmers, it will raise the cost of these worthwhile regulations and laws, and therefore we will have fewer of these laws and fewer of the benefits that go along with them.
There is a technical way in which perhaps that is partly correct, but the obvious thing that I want to point out is that the marginal cost in lost environmental protection would be very slight. This is true for the following three reasons. First, many environmental regulations passed right now are of limited benefit in protecting the environment. These would be the ones most readily set aside if the government could not afford the cost.
For example, there is a regulation in Ontario forbidding the production of sawdust and wood chips at sawmills, even though these chips are used to spread as ground cover by the National Capital Commission and elsewhere. Bureaucrat A who wants the regulation, if there were property rights protections and compensation for the taking of property, would have to justify the cost of that compensation to the Environment Department to bureaucrat B, who would then try to focus perhaps on using the available funds more wisely and not on measures that have no discernible benefit to the environment. This of course applies to every other area.
Second, the government would start to focus on lower cost solutions to the environmental problems that it is called upon to regulate. For example, if the government had to cover the cost of complying with its own regulations, I do not think it would approach the problem of keeping drinking water safe by creating the requirement for concrete retaining tanks for liquid manure which has been done here in Ontario under the nutrient management act. This is perhaps the highest cost possible way of dealing with the legitimate concern about keeping the water table clean and municipal water safe in the wake of the Walkerton tragedy. Because of the cost to download it, there is no need for the bureaucrats to worry about this sort of thing.
Finally, taking actions that impose costs without compensation is actually bad policy in achieving its goal. To take the example of environmental policy, there is what is known as the shoot, shovel and shut up phenomenon where someone recognizes that he or she has an endangered species on his or her property and seeks to shoot it, then shovel and hide the evidence in order to protect the property from having its usage restricted by laws.
This is what we see going on in Goulbourn where right now people are clearing their land in order to ensure they do not get wetland designation. Several years ago I saw my father's next door neighbour out in the country in rural Osgoode, south of Ottawa, do the very same thing to avoid having a wetland designation that might prevent him from severing his property.
There is in fact very little real cost to ensuring compensation. There is a great deal of additional benefit and justice, and as in the example I gave earlier of the Japanese Canadians in the 1940s, it is frequently those who are most disenfranchised and least able to speak for themselves who are the victims of a lack of property rights in the country. Therefore, I urge everybody to vote in favour of the motion before the House today.