Property Rights: The Key to Environmental Protection

The importance of private property rights in a market economy is widely understood. Property rights are seen to play a critical role in motivating and organizing economic activity and in adjudicating disputes. The free exchange of private property is credited with facilitating cooperation among individuals with widely varying interests and encouraging adaptation to changing circumstances.

Less commonly appreciated is the role of property rights in protecting the environment. Secure property rights provide both powerful incentives for the preservation of natural resources and effective tools to resolve differences over resource use. Although the Canadian judiciary has traditionally been committed to protecting property rights, few governments, federal or provincial, have acknowledged the importance of such rights or allowed them to thrive. Indeed, successive governments have systematically overridden property rights, to the detriment of both the economy and the environment.

Because of their economic and environmental value, policies that restore, protect, and strengthen property rights are likely to create considerable benefits. This article focuses on the need to restore the common-law property rights that for centuries empowered people to protect the quality of their air, land, and water. Although it proposes a number of means to this end, it advocates one principal reform: the enshrining of property rights in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.