Stephanie Farrington

The choice of early Canadians to remain closely tied to the British Empire had a major impact on the development of property rights in this country. Although we as a society tend to see ourselves as having more in common with the United States than with the United Kingdom, our system of land ownership, more accurately called real property ownership, does not permit the same level of rights and freedoms over the land we hold as the U.S. system affords. In the United States, landowners usually hold title to the mineral resources located beneath their land; in Canada, this is never the case.