“I am the king of this castle”; “I am the lord of this land”; I can do what I want – it’s my land”!
How many times have you heard these words, or similar ones, from landowners? They often get quite indignant that someone else should have any control over what they do with, or on, their land.
And yet, just think about what a chaotic mess we would be in if a landowner was allowed to open a small, toxic chemical plant next to a hospital or nursing home. Our society is founded on the Rule of Law and that means that we submit to the right of government, be it federal, provincial or municipal (which, after all, are creations of the Crown which ultimately owns the whole country, in theory at least) to impose controls and restrictions on what we can do with our bundle of rights that we call “land ownership”.
And so we have laws, such as zoning bylaws and environmental controls, that limit what we can do with, or on, our land. A large body of law has accrued over the decades to deal with land uses and even to decide which municipality should have jurisdiction over what land.
Our law in Ontario, flowing as it does from English law, is a delicious combination of principles declared over the decades by decisions of Courts of law – we call those decisions “the Common Law” – and of rules created by legislation passed by government.
We’ll talk some more about how some of these things evolved.