OLA reaches into the past to protect the rights of landowners.

Campbellford - The Ontario Landowners Association has added a new weapon in its fight to get governments to back off and respect individuals' property rights, and it goes all the way back to the 1700s.

Land grants, or letters patent, issued by the Crown to settlers awarded them private ownership of specific lots. Those contracts gave the grantees certain rights that remain in effect to this day, even though the properties have changed hands many times since then.

Elizabeth Marshall, secretary of the Ontario Landowners
Association, spoke to local members at a meeting held
in Campbellford March 25. Photo by John Campbell

"They are the most important piece of paper you can have," OLA secretary Elizabeth Marshall told about 75 people last Thursday at a public information session held in Campbellford by the Northumberland/Prince Edward/Hastings Landowners Association. "There is not one piece of legislation, there is not one order in council that can overrule your contract with the Crown because it is based on contract law."

The OLA considers the land patents a powerful line of defence against governments who try to impose their will on the rights of landowners, through measures such as legislation to protect wetlands, endangered species and sources of drinking water.

It means, Marshall said, that "no one can tell you what you can and cannot do on your little piece of heaven."

But it's a weapon that can easily be blunted when wielded by individuals acting on their own, she warned.

"If you go head to head with the government with your Crown patent grants, they will bankrupt you," Marshall said, by taking you to court. And even though contract holders have won "time and time again" at the Supreme Court, not everyone can afford to get that far, she said, so the OLA has launched a Crown Land Patent Grant initiative to create a "big stick" to strike back at government.

The association is asking Ontarians to apply to the Ministry of Natural Resources for land patents showing what rights exist on their properties – not all land grants are the same – and to forward copies of the material to Marshall to build up a database she has created.

When she has obtained a sufficient number, she plans to confront each of the political parties – "because they're all culpable ... for what has happened" – and demand that the offending legislation be "struck down, quashed, amended, whatever it takes," she said.

"We can do it either the nice way or we are going into a class action lawsuit and we will have them charged with breach of contract," Marshall said of the provincial government.

"We can stop what is happening but we all have to work together because if we don't it will not work."

Advertisement

Marshall is "100 per cent sure" the initiative will succeed, based on legal precedents, but it will require the support of "thousands" of people.

She pointed out that the property rights that originated with the Magna Carta in England in 1215 included protection of the environment by prohibiting despoiling a neighbour's soil, water or air, and those prohibitions still apply.

In an interview afterward, Marshall said governments will need to amend or remove legislation that have a direct impact on how property owners, such as farmers, use their land, or compensate them by negotiating on an individual basis.

"If it's in the public good, the public needs to pay for it," Tony Kenny, president of the Peterborough County Landowners Association, told the gathering.

Marshall said she hopes to have the initiative completed prior to the provincial election in 2011.

Posted By John Campbell, Community Press