Paul Warchuk: Property rights are 'precarious' in Canada

Across Canada, some of the most heated disputes – from housing restrictions to Indigenous land claims – turn on this question: how secure are Canadians’ property rights?

The answer may surprise you. Canada is one of the only developed democracies where property rights have no constitutional protection. That gap has real consequences. It can lead to family farms shuttered by regulation, homeowners caught in civil forfeiture, or even recent court decisions like Cowichan Tribes v. Canada which upended long-held assumptions about ownership itself.

To unpack these issues, University of New Brunswick law professor Paul Warchuk joins Inside Policy Talks. Warchuk is the author of a powerful new MLI paper on property rights in Canada, titled Beyond patchwork protection: Towards comprehensive property rights in Canadian law. In it, he traces the philosophical and legal evolution of property from early philosophers up to the Charter era. He argues that property is not only a private entitlement but a public trust that safeguards liberty and prosperity alike.

On the podcast, Warchuk tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at MLI, that “there is a lot of resistance to property rights,” perhaps stemming from the fact that not all Canadians believe these rights serve and protect them.

He added that while most Canadians feel their property rights are secure, the situation is “precarious” because despite some basic protections “it's very easy for government to override them.”

“If you find yourself in the circumstance of one of the unlucky few that is affected in this way,” says Warchuk, “your perspective would change completely, and you'd feel a little bit more of the injustice.”