Legal Foundation for Regulation of Land Development in Canada — with an Emphasis on Quebec

Abstract

The Canadian constitution is not a single document, nor is it entirely written. The distribution of legislative powers between the federal Parliament and the provincial legislatures in contained in the British North America Act of 1867 and amendments.¹ Guarantees of individual rights and liberties analogous to those found in the U.S. Bill of Rights, on the other hand, rest either on the unwritten rules of English constitutional law or on ordinary statute law. The Canadian Bill of Rights,² which is an ordinary statute of the Canadian Parliament taking precedence nonetheless over subsequent federal enactments, has not added any new rules with respect to procedural due process in expropriation matters to those already contained in the federal Expropriation Act.