Lessons on Property: (Re)Making Canada | An Open Legal Coursebook

Origin Stories: Property, Sovereignty and Imperialism

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Property and British Imperial Aims #

Since the early period of British presence in Indigenous North America, “property” – legal relationships among a community with and about land and other things – has been a legal tool used by European colonial powers to advance their aims. That tool has taken different forms and served different functions over the several centuries during which colonialism has been at work. Close attention to these different forms and functions can help us to understand a great deal about where, how and when changing ideas and practices of property have been important in making Canada.

Settler Colonialism, Federalism and State Power

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In Week 2, we started to explore the important place of “possession” in Anglo-Canadian law going back to some of its deeper roots in the liberal theory of writers like John Locke. In the course of that exploration, we situated possession as just one possible form of legal land relation and got some early sense of its challenges and limitations as a basis of property. Joseph William Singer elaborates on this theme:¹

Industrialization, Market Liberalism and Land Use at the Turn of the Century

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A Turn to Governance #

Over the past few weeks we have been focused on questions about recognizing relationships to land and about the central role of two concepts: possession and title. We now turn to a second group of topics that address how–once possession and title receive recognition in law–conflicting uses of land are governed as a matter of property.

From a historical perspective, as settler colonialism advanced based on law’s denial of Indigenous rights and sovereignty (our topic last week), post-Confederation nationalism sought to establish the economic foundation of this new country by continuing to pursue natural resource extraction and, increasingly, to advance industrialization. Central to this economic project were legal tools that developed to address the most significant “externalities” of these activities–namely, the inevitable land use conflicts arising from large-scale environmental pollution and from the growing concentration of people living in close proximity to one another, especially in burgeoning urban centres like Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. We will examine two of these important legal tools this week: (1) remedies available in the law of nuisance and (2) the rise of restrictive covenants annexed to land. While existing in different doctrinal areas, it is important to see both of these as key private-law technologies for regulating land uses in an era before the widespread application of public land use controls more familiar today.

Property, Citizenship and Generational Inequality

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In our final week of new material in the course for this term we will turn our minds to the concept of the “trust” and examine its features by looking at the history of the dispossession and internment of Japanese Canadians during the second world war. The targeting of Japanese Canadians living in British Columbia as “enemy aliens” remains one of the least-discussed examples of state-executed systematic racism in Canada’s history. In exploring this history, we will also begin to encounter the mid-century transition toward a new grammar of Anglo-Canadian legal thought: the modern style. As we will see, this period of Canadian history also has something important to tell us about the connection between property, ownership and citizenship.

Urbanization and Land Use Control in an Urbanizing Canada

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week, will begin to revisit some of last term’s topics from the perspective of the modern style of Anglo-Canadian thought. Our primary focus this week will pick up on our discussion of constructive expropriation from the McLaren v Caldwell and Manitoba Fisheries Inc.. Recall that these cases involve claimed “takings” of property rights (or “sticks” from the ownership bundle) by the state, for which the owner would like to receive some form of compensation.

Housing, Public Space and the Social Welfare State

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week

Indigenous Title and Governance in the Contemporary Colonial State

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week

Community, the Market and Commodification

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This week