Josh Dehaas: U of T protesters get schooled on private property rights
Distributing property through brute force not only leads to violence, it leads to poverty.
By: Josh Dehaas
After Justice Koehnen delivered his ruling Tuesday ordering the occupiers to dismantle the People’s Circle for Palestine at the University of Toronto, one of the protesters accused the school of hypocrisy.
“It’s quite interesting that a university that claims to practice decolonization is falling back on this claim of private property,” master’s student Sarah Rasikh told a journalist on the day before the students began taking down their tents.
“U of T and the Court more specifically is quite literally telling Indigenous students to leave and get off of their own land,” she added.
Rasikh has a point, sort of.
As someone who did law school relatively recently, I can attest that many university professors are downright hostile to the concept of private property. They commonly claim that all of Canada belongs to Indigenous people and that Indigenous peoples don’t believe in private property. Rather, they believe in “sharing.” Decolonization therefore requires that land be treated communally, or so the theory goes. University administrators who pay lip service to the concept of decolonization shouldn’t be surprised when students try to turn theory into action.
Thankfully the law still protects private property rights. Students who didn’t get taught how that works by their professors ought to give Justice Koehnen’s decision a read.
As Justice Koehnen explained, “in our society we have decided that the owner of property generally gets to decide what happens on the property.”
“If the protesters can take that power for themselves by seizing Front Campus, there is nothing to stop a stronger group from coming and taking the space over from the current protesters,” he went on. “That leads to chaos. Society needs an orderly way of addressing competing demands on space. The system we have agreed to is that the owner gets to decide how to use the space.”
“If it is not the owner who gets to determine what happens on the property it will become a brutal free-for-all,” Justice Koehnen added.
This is obviously correct. We can either allow people to take land with brute force as the pro-Palestinian occupiers did, or we can create and adhere to a system of land titles that recognizes individuals as owners of exclusive plots.
The latter is clearly preferable. Distributing property through brute force not only leads to violence, it leads to poverty. When people aren’t confident that they own the land beneath them, they have no incentive to use the land productively, whether we’re talking about growing grain, putting up houses or building a university. Why invest in production if someone can come along and steal the fruits of one’s labour?
Indigenous people long ago figured this out, which is why it’s so annoying to hear people insist they only believe in “sharing.” It’s well-known, for example, that the Indigenous people of Labrador divided up their territory into exclusive family-owned plots so that each group had an incentives to husband beavers for their pelts. You find similar examples in just about any First Nation if you bother to look.
Justice Koehnen found that the protesters occupiers were trespassing on private property, and that U of T had every right to kick them off. As I suggested last week in my non-prediction prediction right here in The Line, a finding of trespass was not only likely, but would probably prove definitive. The law in Ontario is clear that U of T is a private institution entitled to enforce its private property rights.
The protesters’ best counterargument was that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms applied to the university, such that ending the encampment would limit their rights to peaceful assembly and expression. But as I noted last week, even if the Charter applied, the judge would be required to consider whether enforcing property rights was a reasonable limit on those rights, and he’d almost certainly find they were.
Sure enough, as Justice Koehnen explained in his decision, U of T’s request to eject the encampment was so obviously reasonable that it would be demonstrably justified limits on expression and assembly rights even if the Charter applied (and he found that it did not). U of T had no problem with expression or peaceful assemblies between the hours of 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The only thing U of T was limiting was continued expropriation of its private property by way of brute force.
In the end, and after a day of tough talk and posturing, the demonstrators backed down. After two months of occupying the lawn, so to speak, the protesters declared their voices heard, packed up their tents and left. The occupation at U of T is over.
Once they’ve gone home, done some laundry and thought about the last two months, let’s hope the occupiers have learned their lesson about private property — what it is, and why it matters.
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Every one of these protests is a complete waste of time and energy. Want to protest....travel 5000 miles to where its happening and make your point there. No one here gives a fiddlers duck about your complaints, and not one of you has a suggestion of what an appropriate Israeli response would have been. So, since you're devoid of solutions, shut the hell up and go home. Maybe do something useful with your time. Now, I'm off to yell at the nearest cloud.
The joke is, to me at least, that the protesters took other’s land for their own, exclusive use. They enforce that use with guards, or some such gatekeepers, and see no irony in their actions while touting the dismantling of others’ property rights. Their view being to ‘share the land’ and not own it, while excluding others. Quite laughable, I find. I wonder if they know how silly they are and how much damage they do to their cause.