Editor:
I finished reading my online version of The Guardian and exited my home office to face my audience, reduced to one. My wife has become the recipient of my rants about Individual rights and freedoms.
My latest topic is ‘expropriation’. “Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it”. I bring in history because the incumbent premier and I share a common ancestor, Donald Murchison, driven off his land in Scotland, forced to sail with his family as part of the Skye Pioneers to set up in Point Prim in 1803. I wonder what our Donald would have to say about land expropriation and displacing people by one of his descendants.
Lest these people consider turning to legal channels for help, our Charter of Rights and Freedoms offers no protection because the federal government of the day was forced by the provinces to exclude property ownership as a right.
There are other choices. If highway safety is an issue, lower the speed limit to fit in to the image of ‘the gentle Island’, with hefty fines for offenders, thereby feeding the coffers of the government, solving a problem with creditors (‘Bond raters say P.E.I.’s deficit this year is actually $115 million and warn the province it must balance its books by 2015 or risk a credit rating downgrade’, The Guardian, Aug. 11, 2012).
Dan MacInnis,
Brampton, Ont.
