B. The Right to Game

As a landowner, you may have the right to fish and hunt game on your land. However, like anyone else in the province, you must follow provincial hunting and fishing regulations. In other words, just because it's your land, you can't go out and shoot a moose in the off-season. And, if your land is a lot in an urban subdivision, don't try blasting away at that skunk raiding your garbage can.

C. Water Rights

As a landowner, you can use water that flows through your property as you choose, as long as you don't interfere with your neighbours' rights to have the water take its natural course through their property. That means you can drink it, water your livestock with it, irrigate your crops with it, even divert it-as long as it resumes its original course before leaving your land and continues in a natural state. The people downstream from you have the right to have the water flow through their land in an unpolluted state and in a substantially unreduced flow.

D. Mineral Rights

In some provinces (Alberta being one of them), the rights to minerals and petroleum don't legally belong to the landowner (though there are a few exceptions). Rather, the government reserves to itself the right to these products. In Alberta, this fact is especially important in relation to the pketroleum industry; the Alberta government gives the rights to mine oil and gas to petroleum companies by way of special grants. Landowners are compensated financially when petroleum companies by move onto their property to extract oil and gas, but the products themselves don't belong to the landowners.

Check your knowledge by completing Something to Think About 9 on the next page.