November 15, 2010

Mr. Anderson: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I hope to use my time tonight to provide a background of the legislation that this government has passed concerning property rights. It really has been one of the black eyes of this government. This is just the latest in a long list of pieces of legislation that show a total disrespect for the principle of property rights, a belief that the minister knows best and that Albertans should trust the good nature and good will of their government to look after them, a desire to pursue megaprojects that will earn them short-term PR points, without any thought as to the long-term welfare of this province, and a willingness to cast aside long-standing traditional principles to make the implementation of these megaprojects easier for them to conduct.

The protection of property rights is one, if not the most, fundamental role of government. Disturbingly, property rights have been severely eroded in this province since December 2, 2006. I’m going to review some of the most egregious examples in the last four years to demonstrate this.

We had, of course, Bill 19, which turned into the Land Assembly Project Area Act. In this one the government granted itself authority to freeze large tracts of private land for public purposes without having to compensate landowners for relocation costs, losses incurred due to business interruption as well as other related damages. We were told to trust the minister, that the government knows best. We were told this bill wasn’t about confiscating anything; it was only about putting restrictions on your land, encumbrances that might almost make it useless and for an indefinite period of time, but there’s no need for compensation.

Oliver Wendell Holmes in the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a famous ruling 90 years ago, which made clear that overregulation was a form of government confiscation; that is, if the government implements restrictions that diminish the value of your land, then you deserve compensation. But this government knows that despite the Alberta Bill of Rights citizens of Alberta these days don’t really have any meaningful property rights. That’s why in bills like the land assembly act they only have to pay lip service to being fair and not worry about actually being held accountable to the principles that they talk about, like fully compensating landowners for government interference.Who knows what megaproject this government might decide to approve in the province next? Whatever it is, they know best, and that’s what’s important, that there are no independent boards or individual rights that might get in the way. Over and over they’ve been passing laws that expand the prerogative of ministers. In fact, if you look at the Order Paper right now, there are many more of them than just the one we’re debating right now.

Now, the most extreme example of this and one where I personally got burned, I feel, was Bill 36, the land-use framework. This was a bill that at the time was brought forward, and we were told in the caucus that there would be proper property rights protections involved, that there was nothing to fear from this piece of legislation, that everybody’s local government autonomy would be respected. We were told this. I was told this, and naively I believed it, and I went ahead. That was my fault and something that I will use the next 16 months to try to undo.

Nonetheless, I actually spoke in favour of this bill. The problem was that it was the wrong thing to do at the time. It was wrong. It showed a naïveté of trust that I had that the bureaucracies and the government of the day would have their act together and would at the end of the day protect the property rights of its citizens. That’s a lesson that I learned the hard way, that it’s not, in fact, always the case.

This act, Bill 36, authorizes cabinet to implement regional plans for each area of the province. This means that central planners at the Legislature rather than locally elected and accountable municipal councils will specify what types of activities are going to be permitted or prohibited on private land. I saw this first-hand as we went from the legislation to implementation, seeing the discussions that were had between MLAs and ministers regarding MDs around my area, including the MD of Rocky View, seeing the discussions that went around about how we may have to impose upon these local governments these regional plans that were being developed and that centres such as Calgary and others were going to be given essential veto power over where these compact urban nodes, as they’re called, would go.

It was very disturbing, and at first I thought: well, surely the minister in charge wouldn’t ever think about doing something like that. In fact, that wasn’t the case. We don’t know where that is right now. We will see what happens going forward. If the discussions that I had with the ministers involved when I was over on that side are any indication, I’m not hopeful. We’ll be looking to see what they bring forward in that regard.

Obviously, the most infamous of all is Bill 50, the Electric Statutes Amendment Act, 2009, which mandates the construction of billions of dollars’ worth of massive transmission lines criss-crossing private lands up and down Alberta. This bill’s main objective is to bypass the requirement of an objective Alberta Utilities Commission needs-based assessment, which probably would have shown that the degree and the amount of build that was being contemplated was not, in fact, needed and that much of it could have been locally generated and that much of it could have been avoided and ratepayers wouldn’t be on the hook.

It is also resulting in the government offering billions of dollars in untendered, uncompetitive transmission line building contracts to large companies, some of which have obvious ties to the sitting government. The cost of this boondoggle will be passed on to residential, farm, and industrial ratepayers for years. It is an absolute black eye on this government.

Then there’s the other multibillion-dollar megaproject that this government decided was a good idea, which is its motivation for this latest piece of legislation, carbon capture and storage. Environmentalists, of course, have been attacking Alberta for the oil sands in light of the theory that environmentalists have that carbon emissions are the largest contributor to global warming. This government decided it would be cute and a good PR stunt if we stick this carbon dioxide into the ground, pump it right into the ground.

Mr. Mason: Stick it where the sun don’t shine.

Mr. Anderson: Stick it where the sun don’t shine; that’s right. When we were raking in record levels of royalties, they decided we could afford to devote the staggering amount of $2 billion to establishing the infrastructure to capture, transport, and store this CO2 underground in what are called pore spaces or – what are they called? – subterranean aquifers or whatever they are. Alberta has a geological makeup that makes it especially suited for this, they said. Then they realized that while the Crown owns a lot of the resources under the ground in this province, these spaces, meaning the pore spaces, were never considered resources. In fact, pore spaces themselves hadn’t really been considered at all. The gases in them had, but that’s a resource, not a space. Now, they could have said, “Well, let’s focus on the pore spaces under the Crown land,” but that’s a limitation that this experiment probably can’t handle. Then they could have said – well, they could have said a lot of things. What they did say was: what we’ll do is that instead of assessing what property rights people have to this space under the ground, we’re just going to come in and say that we own it.

So here we are today debating Bill 24 for a grand total of one or two or three days before the government declares that all pore space anywhere in the province belongs to the Crown and that ministers can inject whatever they want whenever they want and that there’s nothing anyone can do about it. With this bill the government is pretending that landowners never had a claim to pore spaces under their land.

We believe that if the government has not specified otherwise, people do own that space. We’ve heard from them. This is just a difference in philosophy between us. This is what one of the ministry’s bureaucrats, which I will not name, said to our researcher twice in the briefing, “It’s just a difference in philosophy between us,” as if he meant that there is no right or wrong answer. Well, it certainly is a different philosophy. We recognize that individual rights are not in place at the pleasure of government. If anything, they are actually there to make the government uncomfortable. When there is uncertainty between individual rights and government prerogative, we’re inclined to respect the individual. These folks on the other side, we feel, have been in power for far too long and have forgotten that important fact.

Only recognizing rights when it’s convenient for the government is not what rights are about. There’s a Latin legal phrase that can be translated as follows: whoever owns the land owns it all the way to the heavens and to the centre of the Earth. It is a legal maxim in legal systems based on English common law that still stands today. As it does with all major projects that benefit the public interest, the government ultimately can confiscate or appropriate whatever land it needs to, but citizens have the right to the demonstration that it is necessary and the right to fair compensation.

Besides the dubious premise that carbon capture is in the public interest, which we won’t talk about today, this bill ignores any claim by landowners to own their land. That is the core problem with this bill. Once again, the government views individual rights as a speed bump that they can steamroll with legislation. Their idea of accountability is putting up with complaints from the opposition for a couple of evenings and maybe a negative story or two in the papers the next day.

I’ve only provided the background of eroding rights and the disrespect for citizens that this government seems to show with virtually every bill they bring forward concerning property rights these days. I will leave the remainder of the time to my colleagues to raise specific concerns, and we will try to put forth some amendments in Committee of the Whole that, hopefully, will make this bill, if we cannot defeat it, at least more palatable and respectful of individuals’ property rights.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Deputy Speaker: Standing Order 29(2)(a) allows for five minutes of comments or questions. The hon. Solicitor General and Minister of Public Security.

Mr. Oberle: Thank you. Just a quick question for the member regarding the Land Stewardship Act. The member makes the argument that his naïveté caused him to vote for that bill. That is probably a compelling argument, but I want to sort of carry on to the logical outcome of that. The member was so naive in his understanding that he was actually duped into speaking for the bill, not just voting for it. Carried to its logical conclusion, that would mean that either the member didn’t read the bill or didn’t understand it. He is a lawyer, is he not?

Mr. Anderson: Wow, we have a real sharp one there in the Solicitor General’s office. Yes, I am legally trained, and, yes, I did look over the bill, Bill 36, but as anybody with a modicum of legal training will tell you, simply reading a bill is not enough in and of itself. You have to research its effects, what it will do in practice. Usually you see that in the legal realm, in the courts.

The other thing, too, is that a lot of Bill 36 left a lot of discretion to the ministers, and you should know that if you had read the bill or if you understood it. It leaves a lot of leeway to the minister in charge to make decisions. The problem with that is that you get people like yourself who don’t understand jack squat about property rights and who don’t have any respect for property rights, clearly. People like that, ministers like that, will use this legislation to trample on the property rights of individuals. That’s why it was naive of me to always think that there were going to be people in government and in the ministerships that were going to be respectful of individual property rights.

Absolutely, I should not have spoken to that bill because it wasn’t the right thing to do. I know that it’s difficult for certain people that haven’t spoken against the government their entire careers because they don’t know what it’s like to be able to actually say what they’re thinking or what their constituents want them to say. They just kind of chirp the party line. I know that’s difficult for some members to understand.

Mrs. Forsyth: He was the whip, Rob.

Mr. Anderson: Well, that’s right. He was the whip. You’ve got to give him that.

The fact is, Mr. Speaker, that the Wildrose Alliance does understand property rights. We do understand that government is beholden to the property rights of individuals and that they must respect them. Even when they do have to take them, expropriate them for whatever reason, there needs to be fair compensation, and there needs to be proper consultation. Bill 36 does not do that. Bill 50 certainly does not do that. Bill 24 certainly does not do that. It’s been a pattern. Bill 19 does not do that.

It’s a pattern with this government to continue to pass legislation over and over and over again that shows absolutely no respect for individual property rights. Some of them think it’s almost like some kind of game. I think some of them don’t. I think some of them genuinely probably do at least understand the importance of protecting property rights. The fact of the matter is that actions speak louder than words, and this government has just failed repeatedly on this file. I don’t understand for the life of me why a government who claims to be conservative or claims to believe in the concept that the rights of individuals need to be respected continues bill after bill to pass legislation that does the opposite. This issue is going to cream them in the rural constituencies over the next year and a half – and it should – because people are tired of it. They’re tired of a party who’s conservative in name only acting like a bunch of, you know, big-government progressives, running around taking people’s property rights without fair compensation.

That’s not fair. All for the public good. It’s always for the public good, whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean. They don’t seem to understand the concept that the rights of individuals need to be respected and properly compensated.

Video:

Protecting Property Rights While Growing the Economy
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