Mr. Speaker, it is a great pleasure to stand today to address a motion put forward by my colleague, the Conservative member for Yorkton—Melville. I would like to read the motion into the record:
That, in the opinion of the House, the government should ensure that full, just and timely compensation be paid to all persons who are deprived of personal or private property or suffer a loss in value of that property as a result of any government initiative, policy, process, regulation or legislation.
At this point I want to congratulate my colleague, who is undoubtedly one of the hardest working members of any party in the House. He has acted so well on behalf of taxpayers with regard to the firearms registry, but also in advancing very important issues like property rights. He has been a consistent advocate of those principles. I had the opportunity in the last Parliament to address this issue and I am pleased to do so again. I fully support this motion.
We have to recall the abstract and history of property rights and the fact that it is intertwined completely with western civilization, going back to great thinkers like Aristotle, the Greco-Roman, the Roman civilization, working its way up to philosophers like John Locke. I would like to quote from Locke's work at this point. I think he gives one of the best definitions.
He locates the right of property and labour. He individualizes the right of property, which is certainly an important development in western thought. This is from his Two Treatises of Government , “Chapter V Of Property”:
The “labour” of his body and the “work” of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his own property.