Although the motion judge concluded that the Regulation does not affect property rights, I do not interpret him as concluding that the Regulation does not affect the farmers’ legal rights at all. In any event, in my view, it plainly does. Purchasing and using treated seeds is an exercise of a liberty. A liberty, to use the standard grammar of juridical relationships, is a species of legal right: it is the absence of any law that would constrain any particular action: MacDonald v. City of Montreal, 1986 CanLII 65 (SCC), [1986] 1 S.C.R. 460 (Wilson J., in dissent) at pp. 517-519.[1] Because a liberty is only the absence of a legal restriction, and not a legal or constitutional right that government not create such restrictions, a liberty can be narrowed, or extinguished entirely, by a constitutionally valid statute or regulation.
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