Land Rights And Responsibilities Act, 2006

Jay

Executive Branch Member
Jan 7, 2005
8,366
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http://www.ontla.on.ca/hansard/house_debates/38_parl/Session2/L110.htm#P75_2792

An interesting read on Bill 57, "An Act to amend the Expropriations Act and the Human Rights Code with respect to land rights and responsibilities".

I do believe the motion failed because of the Liberal's unwillingness to pass it but what I found to be rather interesting was Mr. Gilles Bisson's (Timmins-James Bay) (NDP) position on the issue....if any party was to not support such a motion I would suspect the NDP would be it but to my suprise he said this.....

This is an interesting bill, I must say. I had a bit of an opportunity to read it in some detail prior to today, but I had a chance to refresh my memory about five minutes ago. I just want to say up front that I will be supporting this particular bill. New Democrats all believe that people have a need for property rights. But I want to talk about it from a bit of a different perspective.

First of all, what the member is trying to get at is the whole issue of expropriation. I think it's fair to say that at times, with the power of the government, what you're paid for expropriation may not necessarily be the actual worth of the property. We need some mechanisms to make sure that there is a process by which, if it is to be expropriated, it's done at least in a fair manner. I think that's reasonable.
I know a lot of people will look at this as a right-wing issue, and that is what I want to speak to. Some people will look at this and say this is traditionally a position that the right wing of the political spectrum will take, but I think this is an issue that both left and right can agree on, and that is that in a free and democratic society, we have the right to purchase property, and then, when we have that property, we should have some rights to enjoy it. I want to speak a little on where I think we are deficient in this society when it comes to being able to enjoy that property.

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For example, I look at what's happening with property taxes in Ontario. We have an assessment system that has basically gone crazy. We're charging assessments on values that are quite out of whack at times with the actual value of the property. And in some cases the value might be right, but the taxation level imposed is such that the person can't afford to pay because they don't have the means.
So the first issue I look at is what's happened under MPAC with regard to a lot of the assessments in the communities I represent. We now have a system where, rather than sending an assessor to assess the actual property to say how much it is worth, we're saying, "Let's look at a computer model of the neighbourhood to establish what the sale of houses were in that particular neighbourhood." If all of a sudden somebody got lucky and sold a house for more than it should have sold for because the purchaser was prepared to pay, for whatever reason, everybody's building is then assessed at that value. We had situations in Moonbeam, Kapuskasing, Timmins and others where assessed property values in those communities went up 20% and 40% when in fact there was a decrease in the housing market. It made absolutely no sense.

We all know that municipalities then use the assessed value as the means by which they charge local property tax to the property owner, so people's taxes were going through the roof and people were just wild -- rightfully so. When we talk about property rights, we need to talk about a fair property tax assessment system that takes into consideration all the factors, that not only looks at the value of the property but also to what degree the homeowner or property owner is able to pay the tax burden. I've talked to people in my community where I'm astounded that they're paying as much as $6,000 a year for property taxes on a property that, if you were to sell it, wouldn't reflect that value. I say to myself, put it in simple math. When a person has to pay $500 a month in property tax, there's something wrong.
If I have a larger business where I'm making revenue and I've got a large business enterprise going, I understand that I'm probably going to pay a tax higher than $500 a month. That ain't my argument. But for a property owner to pay $500 a month on a municipal tax assessment system, I think it's out of whack. I don't know a lot of people in my community who could afford to pay that. Yet they have to, and it means that both mom and dad have to work, and that gets to the whole issue that parents can't make choices that maybe somebody should stay home and take care of the young ones before they go to school. All of those issues are brought into play. From the perspective of being able to enjoy one's property, we need to reform our property assessment system so it reflects that view. My good friend and colleague Michael Prue will be releasing a document this Friday on that very issue, talking about how we need to reform the property tax system.

Another thing from the perspective of being able to enjoy one's property is the whole issue of where we're at when it comes to people being able to afford to retire, period. I want to speak to that very quickly because it also affects the issue of being able to enjoy one's property. There are many seniors out there who retire today and don't have an adequate income for retirement. In fact, a lot of times they're not seniors; they're laid-off older workers in their late 50s or early 60s who don't have a good pension. Fully 60% of the Ontario population doesn't have any pension at all and 80% don't have adequate pensions. They may be forced to retire because of a layoff situation in their community. I look at Smooth Rock Falls as a good example of that, where that mill, the only employer in town, has closed down and there aren't a lot of places for the older workers to go. What do you do if you're 55, 56, 57 years old and all of a sudden you're faced with selling your House, but there's no value because property values have gone down? Now everybody wants to sell a house and nobody wants to buy a house, so the prices go down. What does that worker do? Again, we're stuck. To me, it speaks to this particular issue of people's property rights. The person purchased the property and, through no fault of their own, because the mill has shut down, is in the situation where they can't sell the property, can't afford to sell the property, so they've got to hang on to it. So they either retire in their community in poverty -- or not in poverty; that's a bit strong. They retire in their community without adequate means to have a good standard of life, or they move out of the community and have to maintain a property that they don't want to hang on to but can't sell.
Again, it speaks to the issue of property rights. We need legislation in this province where we look at the issue of pensions and say to ourselves that we need to have a system of pensions in this province that allows all Ontarians the ability to, over a period of time, build adequate pensions so that they can retire with some dignity and comfort.

I look at some things we could do in this Legislature that would be all that simple to do and, in the long term, would make all that much difference. That is, we should make all pensions portable. It's nuts in our society today where we know nobody works in a plant for 30 years anymore. That is the exception. We have to recognize that the workplace today is five years here, 10 years there, two months here, and you move on to different employers. You should have the right to transfer your pension with you, no matter where you go.

There are mechanisms by which you can do that, and I don't have time in this debate to get into it, but you have to enshrine in the pension legislation the whole issue of portability, so that workers can bring their pensions with them to various workplaces, be it a private workplace, a private employer, or a public employer, and be able to transfer those pensions over.
I argue that we should mandate pensions. Oh, that's really scary to some, but I think we need to mandate pensions. I think we have to have in Ontario a pension system that basically everybody pays into, above and beyond what we pay for Canada pension, so that when you turn 60, with a combination of Canada pension and whatever pension plan you have through your work life, you're able to retire with a decent income. I think it would be to Ontario's net benefit if we were to do that, because it would mean that people in their later years, mid-years, as some might want to call it, in their mid-50s, when they're faced with the situation of possibly having to retire because of circumstances that are out of their control when it comes to the only employer in town closing -- such as what we saw in Smooth Rock Falls or Opasatika or others -- would then at least have an option and be able to say, "I can maintain my property, I can maintain my standard of living, and I can stay within my community. I don't have to uproot and change all of my life."

I just say to people out there, think about it. You have workers in communities like Smooth Rock Falls and others who were raised in that community, who have a lifestyle that is specific to that community, and all of a sudden, at age 50 or late 40s, are faced with turning their entire life upside down and saying, "You've got to move away and go somewhere else." If you're younger, that's a lot easier to do, but if you're older and closer to your retirement, it's much more difficult to do. So I say it also impacts on the issue of property rights, and I think we have to have a mechanism to allow seniors to keep their homes by having a level of taxation on the municipal side that is reasonable and reflects their income, but at the same time, we need to have on the revenue side, for seniors and older adults who retire, a pension system that allows them to do that with some dignity.

I look at the issues of the Human Rights Code which the member wants to amend in Bill 57, and I've got to take the last five minutes and go on to one of the issues that I know Mr. Barrett takes very seriously; I certainly do, and I'm sure other members do as well. That is the issue of human rights as it affects First Nations. Listen, I just came out of a meeting this morning. I was meeting with Lawrence Baxter from Nishnawbe Aski Nation, who's the welfare director, I guess, in charge of the community and social services side of NAN. We were talking about the poverty within those communities. Well, talk about property rights -- there's no property right on reserves. That's one of the fundamental problems we've got.

If we have Caledonia today, it's because of that lack of will on the part of federal and provincial governments to give aboriginal people the right of property. So when they don't have that right, what do you think they do? They go out and do what happened in Caledonia. People may be upset with the people from Six Nations for having done what they've done, but I think we need to understand the context in which it has happened. I say it is also a fundamental issue of property rights. You are not allowed, as a First Nation citizen of this province and this country, to own property on your own reserve.
Can you imagine living in your own communities, as MPPs -- most of us own houses here, right? Imagine you lived in your community -- in my case, Timmins -- and you could not own the property on which your house sits. How alienated would you feel? In our European concept of property rights and ownership, where much of this comes from, is the history of the development of property rights. We understand that a fundamental part of being able to own your own home is to own the property. Well, in First Nations, we say, "You don't have that right." I think if we're going to amend the Human Rights Code, one of the things I'd like to raise in committee -- I know we can't do it in this particular debate and it may not be a subject specifically for this bill -- is that we need to take a look at the issue of property rights for First Nations people. We have to be able to say that they too are citizens of Ontario, they too are citizens of Canada. We need to make sure that they enjoy the basic benefits of living within our society, and one of those is the issue of property rights. Why is it that, in our modern society of Canada, a country that is seen as a leader in the world when it comes to human rights, we allow saying to First Nations people, "You don't have property rights"? It is absurd. Then we wonder why First Nations people blockade the highway or blockade a housing development. This is one of the fundamental issues that's the core of all of this.

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I just think that in our own capacity, in our own ability as a Legislature, we need to amend our laws and then work with our federal government to force them to do the same and start recognizing that First Nations people, no matter where they live in this country, and in our case this province, are citizens of the province and citizens of the country and should have the basic benefits. I say to those people who may be watching the debate and who say, "Oh, yeah, but they have it so well off over there" -- I was talking to Lawrence about that this morning, the attitude of some who say, "Well, they live on reserve, they get free Ski-Doos every two years, they get a free house, they get a cheque sent every month. Life is grand." Well, I say to all of you, go live on a reserve for a month. I'll pick a few for you. I'll pick some of the better ones. You're going to come back after a month and tell me, "My God, how did we allow this to happen?"
I say to all of us, let's give our collective heads a shake and start to recognize that an injustice to one is an injustice to all. The quicker we realize that First Nations people have been left behind far too often in our society when it comes to mainstream decisions around rights -- we have left First Nations people behind, and then we wonder why they're out protesting on the highway or the property development. I say it's because we've left them behind far too long....

I just want to say that we support, as New Democrats, the concept. We understand that there are issues. We don't believe that society doesn't have a certain right, but we certainly have to give people a fair process in that process.

I don't agree with every aspect of his commentary but nevertheless an interesting position and they gave the bill their support.

Please read the entire debate at the link provided.