From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Joseph Quesnel

Most pundits missed it, but Alberta’s revised Bill of Rights just strengthened property rights in a big way. Senior research fellow Joseph Quesnel breaks down how new amendments could protect landowners from regulatory takings—government actions that restrict property use without compensation. He examines key Supreme Court of Canada rulings and explains why every Canadian jurisdiction should take note. Could this be a game-changer for property rights?

Property rights amendments prevent governments from seizing land or restricting its use without compensation

Alberta is one of the few Canadian jurisdictions with a citizen’s bill of rights outlining fundamental freedoms. In 1972, the Lougheed government introduced the Alberta Bill of Rights, which supersedes other laws and requires provincial legislation to be consistent with it.

Premier Danielle Smith faced controversy last year for amending Alberta’s Bill of Rights. While most commentators focused on the amendments protecting the right to refuse vaccinations, they overlooked the significance of changes that strengthen property rights.

Section 1 now states: “The right to the enjoyment of property and the right not to be deprived thereof to the extent authorized by law and except by due process of law.”

Another new clause reads: “The right not to be subject to a taking of property except to the extent authorized by law and where just compensation is provided.”

The law defines a “taking” in two ways: as “a transfer of property ownership without the consent of the owner (expropriation)” and as a situation where “an owner of property [is] being deprived of all reasonable uses of that property.”

Unlike the United States, Canada lacks constitutional protections for property rights. While Canadians have some legal safeguards, they are not as extensive as those in the U.S. In the British common law tradition, there is a presumption that if the government takes a citizen’s property, it must follow legal procedures and provide compensation.

This principle dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215, which opposed arbitrary seizure, and extends to the 1920 British case Attorney General v. De Keyser’s Royal Hotel, which ruled: “Unless the words of the statute clearly so demand, a statute is not to be construed to take away the property of a subject without compensation.”

Following this precedent, federal, provincial and territorial governments in Canada must provide fair compensation when expropriating property. While provinces and territories have different expropriation laws, they all require due process.

However, a legal loophole allows governments to deprive citizens of their property without compensation. Courts refer to this as a “regulatory taking” when government regulations restrict land use to the point that it is effectively expropriated.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled on regulatory takings in two cases: Canadian Pacific Railway Co. v. Vancouver (2006) and Annapolis Group Inc. v. Halifax Regional Municipality (2022). The court determined that compensation for regulatory takings requires two conditions: the government must acquire a beneficial interest in the property, and the regulation must remove all reasonable uses of the land. A beneficial interest means the government gains a financial share or the right to occupy a property without legally owning it.

Peter Russell, one of Canada’s top constitutional law scholars, argued that the requirements established in the CPR case are nearly impossible to meet. Proving the removal of “all” reasonable uses sets a high bar, granting governments broad discretion to restrict land use without compensation.

The Annapolis ruling clarified this issue. The Supreme Court determined that municipalities do not need to gain a proprietary interest in a property to constitute a regulatory taking. Instead, a claimant only needs to prove the government received “a benefit or advantage accruing to the state” due to regulatory activity. This means the government can deprive a titleholder of potential economic use without taking legal ownership.

The Annapolis decision also established that courts must consider future-oriented land uses when determining whether a regulatory taking has occurred. The amended Alberta Bill of Rights now explicitly includes both expropriations and regulatory takings, strengthening property rights protections.

This amendment is significant because it expands safeguards for Albertans by applying not only to provincial laws but also to municipal bylaws. While Alberta cannot enforce laws that conflict with the amended Bill of Rights, the revisions give courts more authority to ensure governments treat citizens fairly.

The updated Bill of Rights is now law in Alberta. Other provinces and territories should follow its lead and strengthen protections for their citizens.

Joseph Quesnel is a senior research fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

Carl Marcotte, Candu Energy, Scott Henuset, Energy Alberta, and William McLeod

From Resource Works

By Nelson Bennett

Solving emissions problem is turning Alberta into a clean-tech powerhouse.

While oil, gas and pipelines took up a lot of oxygen at last week’s Global Energy Canada Show in Calgary, there was also a considerable focus on clean energy, clean-tech and decarbonization.

Alberta’s very survival in a decarbonizing world depends on innovation, best practices and regulations that will allow it to continue to produce oil and gas while trying to meet net zero targets that, like a mirage, appear to move further away the closer we get to them. Necessity being the mother of invention, Wild Rose Country has become rather inventive. It has become something of a clean-tech powerhouse and, as a result, has made some notable progress in its emissions intensity. Alberta’s industrial carbon tax, in place since 2007, and which hit $95 per tonne in 2025, has been used to fund emissions abatement technology and innovation through the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) program.

According to the Government of Alberta, the province has, to date, achieved:

• an 8.7% decline in overall emissions since 2015;
• a 52% decline in methane emissions since 2014;
• a 26% decline in oil sands emissions intensity since 2012; and
• 15 million tonnes of CO2 sequestered through carbon capture and storage.

The Pembina Institute, it is worth noting, has taken issue with some of Alberta’s reporting. Based on the federal National Inventory Report, Alberta’s methane emissions have declined by 35% between 2014 and 2023, not 52%.

Information sessions at last week’s conference covered topics like geothermal energy, lithium extraction, methane emissions detection and reduction technology, low-carbon hydrogen production and use, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear power. Alberta’s contributions to the energy transition and decarbonization is, I think, a bit of an untold story.

In the case of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS), it’s a story that some environmentalists don’t want to hear, and don’t want anyone else to hear. In 2023, Greenpeace and two other environmental NGOs filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau against the Pathways Alliance, saying its claims of potential emissions reduction through CCUS constituted greenwashing. The Trudeau government responded with an anti-greenwashing bill — C-59 — that puts companies at risk of fines for making claims on emission reductions that are not backed by “adequate and proper” testing and evidence. Basically, companies will need to show their homework before making claims on climate benefits or risk hefty fines.”Some of the things that I’ve said would be illegal for my companies to say under the existing law because it would be called greenwashing,” Premier Danielle Smith said at last week ‘s conference. Green fundamentalists don’t want to hear about climate benefits, if it involves things like carbon capture, which they view as extending the lifetime of fossil fuels. Maybe they didn’t get the memo from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 3, which last year pronounced in a special report that carbon sequestration is “unavoidable if net zero CO2 or GHG emissions are to be achieved.”

Alberta’s oil and gas industry understands full well there is a big target on their backs: the oil sands. This energy intensive form of extracting oil generated 86.5 million million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (CO2e) in 2023, according to the Alberta government. That accounts for 33% of Alberta’s total GHG emissions, and is getting perilously close to the federal government’s emission’s cap for oil and gas.

Alberta ingenuity and innovation in extracting oil from sand led Canada to become the world’s fourth largest oil producer, with huge economic benefits for Canada. Alberta is now applying that ingenuity to try to shrink its GHG profile. Alberta has had some of the largest emissions reductions in the power generation sector in Canada recently, thanks to the phasing out of coal power.

Last year, it retired its last coal power plant, meaning the province reached its goal of phasing out coal six years ahead of federal and provincial targets of 2030. As a result, emissions from Alberta’s electricity sector declined 54% between 2015 and 2023, according to the Alberta government. It accomplished this by investing in wind and solar power, backed by firm natural gas power. Alberta now has about twice the amount of installed wind power as B.C. Alberta also reached methane emission reduction targets ahead of schedule. The Alberta government reports a 52% decline in methane intensity between 2014 and 2023, exceeding the target of a 45% decrease by 2025.

According to a recent S&P Global report, the GHG intensity of Alberta’s oil sands has declined 23% since 2009. And since 2019, S&P reports, the pace of oil sands emissions growth has slowed, with a 3% increase in emissions since 2019, despite a 9% growth in oil and gas production. Alberta’s challenge is that, as long as it plans to increase oil and gas production — and it does — reducing its emissions is like draining a bathtub while the faucet is still on. While emissions intensity may go down, absolute emissions could still grow with production growth, and Danielle Smith would like to see Alberta’s oil production double. So, some pretty big gains will be needed if Alberta is to achieve the dual goal of increasing oil production while trying to bring its emissions intensity down to zero by 2050. The only way to do that is through large-scale CCUS, and Alberta has become a global leader in its deployment. Thanks to CCUS, Alberta is poised to become a leading producer of blue hydrogen, ammonia and other “net-zero chemicals.” Through CCUS initiatives like the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line and the Shell Quest CCS project, Alberta has already sequestered 13.5 million tonnes of CO2, according to Emissions Reduction Alberta.

The Pathways Alliance — a consortium of Alberta’s biggest oil producers — propose a $10 billion to $20 billion investment that includes a large scale-up of CCUS, to decarbonize oil sands production and Alberta’s petrochemical industry. According to Natural Resources Canada, the estimated sequestration of the Pathways project would be 13.9 Mt CO2 captured by 2030 — 4.2 MT per year — and 62 Mt per year by 2050. A buildout of CCUS infrastructure in Alberta’s refining and petrochemical complex in the Edmonton area would capture CO2 from gas combustion. “That then puts them on the road to net-zero aviation fuels, net-zero chemicals, what-have-you,” Chris Bataille, adjunct research fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me. “If you look at this as a transition, it’s a necessary thing to do, and we have the right geology for it, and these companies know how to do this kind of thing.”

In addition to CCUS, Alberta also now plans to become a nuclear power producer. A company called Energy Alberta plans to deploy existing Canadian nuclear technology — the CANDU reactor. It proposes to build a 1,000 megawatt twin CANDU MONARK reactor north of Peace River, Alberta. It is now in the early stage of a federal Impact Assessment process. If the federal Liberal government is serious about achieving its ambitious climate policy objectives, it needs to either help Alberta with its ambitious decarbonization efforts, which would include some major federal subsidies, or just get out of its way and let Alberta do what it does best, which is innovate.