Danielle Smith Speaks Out On Property Rights!

Dear Editor

The PC government has developed a number of disturbing habits in the last few years - overspending and budget deficits, consolidating and centralizing health care delivery, and an ever increasing contempt for democracy - but nothing quite compares to its ongoing assault on property rights.

Private property, and the rights that protect it, form the bedrock of any free and democratic society. Government authority ends where private property - and the rights of those who own it - begins.

Good governments respect property rights and the role they play in limiting the power of the state. Bad governments trample on them to expand that power. This is what we've seen in Alberta.

Since winning a majority government in 2008, the PCs have passed three bills each aimed at increasing its own power to control land and infrastructure development at the expense of landowners and taxpayers everywhere.

Bill 19, the Land Assembly Project Area Act, gives the government the authority to seize private land from individuals and businesses without due process and full compensation. Bill 50, the Electric Statutes Amendment Act, relieves utility companies of having to demonstrate need for new megaprojects being built on that seized land-megaprojects that taxpayers pay for but utility companies get to own.

But the law that ties them all together is Bill 36 - the Alberta Land Stewardship Act. This is the law that makes the other two so dangerous. Essentially, Bill 36 carves the province into seven land use regions where all private and public land will be under the direct control of the cabinet in Edmonton. The Bill gives the cabinet supreme power and its regional plans will supersede every single piece of legislation, municipal development plan, lease, permit, approval, licence and title in existence. You name it, Bill 36 overrides it.

With Bill 36 in place, not only can this government seize private property and waste billions of dollars building unnecessary infrastructure on it, but on it can do so on a whim of the cabinet devised behind closed doors without regard to current land-use, be it residential, commercial or industrial, with no compensation.

What's worse, the bill strips away the centuries-old ability of the courts to protect citizens and their property from these reckless government acts. The bill bars any court from interfering with cabinet's centrally planned decisions. Make no mistake, this kind of law is unprecedented in a western parliamentary democracy.

The Stelmach government isn't just chipping away at our property rights, it has taken a sledge hammer to them.

That is why one of the first acts of a Wildrose government will be to repeal those three laws and enact a new Alberta Property Rights Preservation Act, a landmark law that will recognize the protection of private property rights for the first time in our province's history.

In the meantime, I encourage everybody to research these three bills to fully understand their farreaching impacts, and then get involved in the upcoming efforts to have them repealed.

Contact your MLA and let them know the government has gone too far.

Danielle Smith, Wildrose Leader
Former Campaign Director, Alberta Property Rights Initiative
Former Managing Director, Canadian Property Rights Research Institute

Article ID# 2921760

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Comment: Sounds like a corporate (communist) take over to me! Danielle is speaking truth to power but needs to be in power to stop the theft of our freedoms, rights, and property. The way she is going and on this one issue alone, she will soon be there!

At least that is what I think, how about you?


Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.