GROW-OPS AND OUR CASTLES

Municipal governments should not be trammeling on the rights of
tenants and landlords in a poorly thought-out rush to try to deal with
marijuana grow-ops.

North Cowichan is the latest municipality to fall into the trap,
passing an anti-drug bylaw that is both unenforceable and unfair to
innocent residents.

The controlled-substance bylaw includes measures intended to add
municipal fines to penalties already imposed under the Criminal Code
for drug production offences.

It's hard to see the point. People undeterred by the possibility of
fines, jail and forfeited possessions aren't likely to give up the
idea of running a grow op or drug lab because of a bylaw. But most of
those measures are at least benign, if ineffectual.

The bylaw also requires landlords to inspect rental properties --
homes, businesses, storage units -- at least once every 60 days. If
they don't and a drug operation is found, they are threatened with big
fines.

North Cowichan councillors seem to have forgotten a basic principle of
our system of law, captured in an expression that's been around for
some 500 years: "A man's home is his castle." Forced intrusions are
considered so serious that police are required to persuade a court
that they have a good reason to enter a home against the occupant's
wishes. The principle applies to everyone, owner or renter.

Now North Cowichan council is undoing centuries of legal principle, at
least for the 25 per cent of residents who live in rental
accommodation.

Landlords are being told they should be intruding every two months,
effectively acting as agents of the state. Seniors, families, people
who are ill all face the erosion of their basic right to the sanctity
of their home.

All this even though councillors had no evidence the bylaw would be
enforced, or effective, even if it were.

Most landlords will, thankfully, ignore the bylaw.

But it remains offensive. Canadians have sacrificed a great deal to
protect their rights. It is wrong for municipal councils to erode them
so casually, to such little purpose.