BELLEVILLE – How can the government just take away someone’s private property?
Many people are questioning how the federal government could expropriate the Quinte West farm that has been in the Meyers family for two centuries.
David DeMille, a lawyer with Templeman Menninga LLP in Belleville, explains that expropriation is the act of acquiring land through force by a government for public use.
It’s not ideal for either the government or the property-owner, he says, adding that negotiation for compensation is what drags the process on – although Frank Meyers’s battle of more than seven years with the government is an unusually long one.
It’s also not a battle Meyers is likely to win, he added:
But most property-owners don’t need to worry about the possibility of expropriation, DeMille said. A government can only expropriate if it can prove that privately owned land is needed for public purposes.
In Meyers’s case, the Department of National Defence says it needs the land for a training facility for the military’s Joint Task Force 2 unit.
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