Land Purchase Act (1875)

Land Purchase Act, 1875
Title and preamble to the Land Purchase Act, 1875
General Assembly of Prince Edward Island
CitationSPEI 1875, c. 32
Territorial extentPrince Edward Island
Enacted byGeneral Assembly of Prince Edward Island
EnactedJune 30, 1875

The Land Purchase Act, 1875[1] was a statute passed by the General Assembly of Prince Edward Island in 1875. Much of the land in the province was owned by absentee landlords, and the objective of the statute was to force the landlords to sell their estates to the provincial government, which would in turn sell the land at lower prices to local farmers.[2]

The statute transformed land ownership in the province. The issues that were ultimately addressed by the legislation represented a key element in the negotiations that led to Prince Edward Island's entry into Confederation in 1873. William Buell Richards, the first Chief Justice of Canada, wrote that the Land Purchase Act was to be "viewed not as ordinary legislation, but as the settling of an important question of great moment to the community, and in principle like the abolition of the Seigniorial tenure in Lower Canada and the settling of the land question in Ireland. [...] The great object of the Statute seems to have been to convert the leasehold tenures into freehold estates, a matter of very great importance, and one which, if not settled, would be likely to affect the peace as well as the prosperity of the province."[3][4]

  1. ^ Land Purchase Act, 1875, S.P.E.I. 1875, c. 32
  2. ^ 1875 Act, Preamble
  3. ^ McCallum, Margaret (1999). "The Sacred Rights of Property: Title, Entitlement, and the Land Question in Nineteenth Century Prince Edward Island". Essays in the History of Canadian Law: 395–7.
  4. ^ Kelly v. Sullivan (1877), 1 SCR 3, at p. 35.