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Citizens of the Nisga’a Nation in British Columbia have had private property rights since 2012 and, despite what doomsayers have said for years, the sky has not fallen. If anything, anecdotal evidence finds that people on the reserve are looking into using their land to build businesses and secure rental properties.

In 2009, the Nisga’a was the first indigenous community in Canada to experiment with individual “fee simple” property ownership. Fee simple estate is the highest form of property ownership, where land can be bought, sold, transferred or willed to whomever the owner wishes. However, governments can still regulate land use, collect property taxes, exercise police action and expropriate that land for public purposes.

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The Nisga’a Landholding Transition Act applies only to Nisga’a citizens, and the land in question must be zoned residential and have an area no greater than 0.2 hectares. The Nisga’a government said this was done to ensure that the benefits of land ownership go to Nisga’a families, rather than the land-development industry. The Nisga’a government also quickly noted that the land designated residential, and hence eligible for fee simple ownership, comprised only 100 hectares, or .05 per cent of total Nisga’a lands. This situation is quite far from some sort of mass “privatization” of lands.