I live in a rural area and the farmers were beside themselves when the province tried to mess with property rights a few years ago. Some people don't seem to understand how a few landowners can cost the taxpayers a fortune just because they want to be pissy.
The province has been trying to regionalize water plants and run pipelines around the province. Uncooperative farmers and ranchers are costing the taxpayers millions (if not billions). We just completed a 6 mile pipeline 5 years ago that cost an additional $250k just because one farmer didn't want it crossing his property. I had coffee Saturday with some of these same farmers that were bitching about Kweebek and their "interference"
I have no idea what the issue was in Alberta a few years ago; many years ago it was the oil companies drilling wells on farmland, and ripping up a good 5 - 10 acres doing so. I remember mineral rights trump surface rights, as wrong as that may be. NS had its own property rights issues for the last number of years; private Australian mining companies running to the government and successfully having them expropriate private land for commercial use, private quarry companies successfully doing likewise taking land that has been in one particular family for just over 3 centuries. And Quebec is worse. Plus I don't think Ontario, (where most of the proposed pipeline already exists) is any more averse than Quebec or the Maritimes to expropriate if the need requires it.
Maybe you could educate me here; I thought pipelines were buried and the biggest inconvenience was during the construction phase. I dunno. Plus, to my understanding much of this pipeline already exists and is to be re-purposed to carry bitumen rather than natural gas in the opposite direction.
One thing I am pretty sure of is that Obama is being rather disingenuous nixing the pipeline to the Gulf coast considering there is enough pipeline in the US to encircle the globe 4 times.
As much as I believe property rights deserve the utmost respect, land you do not have title to, i.e. Crown land, belongs to all of us collectively. Unfortunately the current climate, so to speak, gives hellofalot more weight to the cries of the pseudo environmentalists. Thank you Maurice Strong.