Is Canada Built on Stolen Land?

The question is much less simple than progressives imagine.

“The British decision to conquer Australia was the original sin”, declared one Twitter user this month. “Britain seized territory to which it had no right. Her gaining Australia was theft. Open and shut.” Its adamant author, a retired Irish civil servant, had just viewed a recent podcast in which I discuss colonisation with the former deputy prime-minister of Australia, John Anderson. What he said of Down Under, he’d no doubt say of the True North, too.

But it’s really not that simple.

In settled societies like Australia and Canada, there are property laws defining who owns what and where disputes arise there are judicial authorities to decide. Similarly, between national societies there are treaties comprising international law, which defines borders and establishes courts to arbitrate. Law creates rights.

A right is a claim to an important element of human flourishing, which is backed up by the social institutions of law, police, and courts. One such element is the freedom to build a life out of a set of material resources. Where we live cheek by jowl with other people, and where resources don’t abound, those people pose a threat to our freedom, since what we currently have in our hands they might well like to take into theirs. This kind of situation is susceptible to constant conflict, and since constant conflict doesn’t allow for much flourishing at all--except for thugs and warlords—societies have learned the wisdom of creating rules about who has the freedom to use particular things, and to back up those rules by threatening to punish thieves. Those rules or laws, supported by social authority and the threat of punishment, create rights to own things—rights to property.

Suppose, then, a situation where members of two very different societies encounter one another for the first time. Since these societies have made no treaties with each other, there is no international law to regulate their interactions. The freedom of each to use resources such as land is highly insecure, therefore, neither party having a legal right to property. So, where members of one society trespass on the territory of the other, taking it, settling on it, and exploiting it for their own purposes, no right has been violated.

Still, an injustice may have been done. But only if we don’t follow Thomas Hobbes in thinking that justice springs into life on the back of contracts or treaties—only if we move in the direction of Thomas Aquinas, believing instead in universal moral principles built into the nature of things, which precede social conventions. One such principle is that we ought not take from other people things in which they have invested their time and effort, or on which their social life has come to depend, or which they need to survive.