VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Think you actually own your so-called "private" property? Better know its history going back to the Ice Age, if a new landmark ruling is any indication.
A Native American tribe in Canada has just succeeded in convincing a Canadian superior court that it owns 732 acres of land on which homes, a golf course, roads and other private establishments have been built. Too bad the homeowners didn't have an archaeological license or a crystal ball when they made their purchases, because the court explained that around 1860 – several years before Canada was even transformed from a British colony into an actual country – the governor of the area, representing the Queen of England, set aside that land for the tribe that lived only on part of it. Over the next few decades, the new Canadian government began selling off the unoccupied parts. Someone has to now pay for that slip-up. So it may as well be a bunch of folks whose great-grandparents weren't even a zygote when all this went down.
The court has now decided that the tribe owns all the land. But they could also generously decide to allow other folks to build and live on it – if they wanted to. Cue the current homeowners' property values plummeting, because who in their right mind would want to invest in a years-long headache while the issue remains in limbo? Homeowners have already reported that their banks are ghosting them and their mortgages like bad dates whose baggage load suddenly came crashing into view.
The next stop is the Supreme Court of Canada, where, if the ruling isn't overturned, it risks transforming Canada into the very first communist trial run under a new globalist order. "Welcome to 2030: I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better," wrote a former Danish environment minister on the World Economic Forum website back in 2016.
Suddenly, it doesn't seem entirely out of the realm of possibility that homeowners could be reduced to "renting" the land from entities that might some day be considered – or transformed into – government-backed proxies, in the same way that states support and instrumentalize proxies abroad to serve their interests. Particularly when just a few years ago, new United Nations-backed government legislation effectively resulted in tribes exercising veto power over the construction of gas pipelines critical to Canada's economic sovereignty.
Don't think that this could ever come to America? Consider that Common Law cases in one jurisdiction, like Canada, can influence decisions in others, including the U.S.
You might be asking how all this even came about. Why is this claim being made now, when judges are referencing facts from nearly two centuries ago? Granted, some far-left academic types have been promoting the idea of deconstructing capitalist societies by returning lands to indigenous peoples for decades now, but it was such a radical position that it was considered the exclusive domain of a fantasy fringe.
But then came the widespread popularization and formalization of land acknowledgments – a phenomenon whose seeds appear to have emanated from Vancouver-area academia. What's the harm in a few words, right?
Now, land acknowledgments are rampant all across Canada, and growing in popularity in the U.S.
It's rare for events or meetings – particularly public ones – to not start with some spoken statement along the lines of, "We acknowledge being on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory" of some native group "who continues to live on these lands and care for them, along with the waters and all that is above and below." Nice job of even working in a blatant reference to the very definition of landowners' rights under the law: "whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to the heavens and down to the depths."
After hearing someone say a million times that you're using their car, why act surprised when someday they tell you that they want it back – like the head of the local provincial government here is now doing, after blatantly vowing that private property rights won't be impacted by any tribal territorial claims.
As usual, it's the Left pushing this nonsense the hardest. There's no shortage of leftist groups promoting land claims under the pretext of environmental justice and social change. In many cases, they're funded to the tune of millions of dollars by special interests and even by the Canadian government itself.
You have to wonder why the Canadian government is so psyched about helping the cause to be tossing cash at it like it's wrapped around a pole and wearing Lucite heels.
Give a leftist an inch, and they'll pull out a measuring tape that never ends. Every single time. That's why every attempt they make to crack open the Overton Window needs to be promptly slammed shut.
Their societal re-engineering efforts always start with something easy enough to ignore, like insisting that people can choose from a variety of personal pronouns. But then it ends with kids being allowed to choose to chop off their private parts and parents being ordered to attend re-education classes for objecting. Or it starts with euthanasia being legalized for genuinely compassionate purposes, only for leftists to then end up promoting it as a funky lifestyle choice. Or with decriminalizing pot, only for taxpayers to soon thereafter find themselves paying for the heroin that junkies shoot up in their fully subsidized hotel rooms.
These are all hallmarks of a pending implosion. History shows that once property rights are unsettled, trust in the system follows close behind. Without that trust, democracy itself starts to wobble. Canada may just be the first domino if the Supreme Court doesn't put an end to this lunacy.
Rachel Marsden is a columnist, political strategist and host of independently produced talk shows in French and English. Her website can be found at http://www.rachelmarsden.com.