Hello Folks,
For many years now, the Ontario Landowners have promoted the Land Patent Grants (or Letters Patent) as a valuable part of our property rights granted to us in the Great Charter, The Magna Carta. We consider them to be a contract with the ‘crown’, sealed by the Great Seal and promising us, our heirs and assigns, the free and unobstructed use and control of our private property, forever.
Obviously there are restrictions on that private property as spelled out in common law that say we have to be good citizens and respect the rights of our neighbours.
One question that we are often asked is ‘what is the difference between patent grants and the native treaties.’ People ask “how come, if our grants are so good, they are not recognised as such by people, governments and courts”.
We all know how much importance natives place on their treaties. They have done a good job of revisiting the words in these agreements. Their children have gone to school and received law degrees and continued the fight to make sure that the promises that were made in the treaties, are fulfilled. Now, not all natives are in a daily battle to hold the government to their promises and maybe some native groups try to read more power into the words of the treaties than were originally intended or agreed upon, but for the most part, the native community stands together and present its case to government agencies and consulting committees and when those avenues stall, the natives go to court to present their cases.
Land Patent Grants (LPG’s) are the original agreement with the crown (same crown, same era as the treaties) that established the foundation of this country and are even more powerful than the treaties because they granted ownership of said land to private individuals. The treaties did not grant ownership to individual natives and so the land could not be used for collateral to borrow and build wealth through entrepreneurship. Still, the patents are fluffed off by politicians, lawyers and regular citizens as inconsequential. WHY? How can this be when Letters Patent are written to create every government office, including the governor general, every incorporated entity and every piece of private property that is severed from crown land and put into private ownership, even today?
The answer as always, is “human nature”! No matter how well constitutions are written to protect the rights of people, as soon as politicians get into power, they start to try and figure out a way to get around the rules so that they can do whatever they or their entourage of supporters want. This is not to suggest that politicians are all immoral, crooks and thieves. The majority, in my opinion, start out to do their very best to serve their constituents but the big government, political machine often camouflages and blurs the lines between right and wrong decisions. To that end, many politicians years ago, recognised that most immigrants coming to Canada, did not understand what they had in their Patent Grants and thus they could ignore those agreements and hide them away from the public so no one would ever challenge infringements by government agencies on private property. At the same time, worldwide attitude from the United Nations started to promote the idea that land was too important to be allowed to be owned and controlled by individuals, this being the gist of the words from Agenda 21.
The result has been complete ignorance of the agreements that were signed by the crown. We certainly understand why new immigrants coming to Canada would not have any grasp of our original documents but the fact is that people with 150 years of family heritage in this country are also unaware of those agreements. Lawyers tell us that no real time is spent teaching the virtues of the Patent Grants in university and certainly, people making laws now, completely ignore them.
So, why do Native Treaties stand as written and on the other hand Land Patent Grants are ignored? It is simple! The natives as a group, stand up for their treaties and the rest of us don’t stand up for the Patent Grants as a whole. Most of us have never heard of them, others are discouraged by lawyers and politicians and still others don’t want to be part of the controversy.
Let’s stand up together folks!
Divided we Fall!
Tom Black