377
4.-As your Memorialists are well aware that your Lordship has been made fully acquainted with the facts connected with the visitation of bubonic plague with which this Colony was unhappily afflicted last year, they do not purpose setting out these facts at any length, more especially as they were fully described in a despatch from His Excellency Governor Sir William Robinson addressed to your Lordship upon the 20th day of June last and which was published in Hongkong on the 1st of September last.
5.--As however certain dates may be of importance when considering the statements of your Memorialists hereinafter set out, they would respectfully remind your Lordship that the first Official Proclamation made under the Health Ordinance of 1887 with reference to the Plague was issued upon the 10th May, 1894, and that this proclamation was revoked upon the 3rd September, 1894, while the Ordinance with reference to which your Memorialists are now addressing your Lordship was passed on the 29th December, 1894, and it was only on the 5th January, 1895, that the Chairman of the Permanent Committee of the Sanitary Board notified the owners of houses mentioned in the First Schedule to Ordinance 15 of 1894 that they could obtain possession of their houses by applying to the Captain Superintendent of Police.
6. Upon the 26th September, 1894, an Ordinance known as "The Taipingshan Rosumption Ordinance, 1894," was passed by the Legislative Council and by this last mentioned Ordinance certain lots of land in the Taipingshan District of the City of Victoria were resumed by the Government of the Colony and revested in the Crown as from the 1st day of June, 1894, and it was provided that full and fair compensation should be paid to the owners of the premises resumed and to all persons having any right or interest therein, such compensation to be determined by a Board of Arbitrators as mentioned in the Ordinance, and all sums of money awarded by the Board as compensation are to bear interest at the rate of 7 per cent from 1st June, 1894, until payment by the Government to the parties entitled thereto or under certain circumstances until payment into the Supreme Court.
7.-The owners of the premises situate outside of the area resumed by the Government under the Taipingshan Resumption Ordinance cannot claim compensation under that Ordinance, but the houses directly affected by "The Closed Houses and Insanitary Dwellings Ordinance of 1894" have been taken out of the hands of the owners by the Permanent Committee of the Sanitary Board for the benefit of the Colony, and as regards the premises mentioned in the 1st Schedule to the last mentioned Ordinance the owners were not permitted to reoccupy their premises until the 5th January, 1895, although as will be hereafter pointed out the said premises were declared to have been disinfected and to be in a sanitary condition many months before that date.
8.-The houses mentioned in "The Closed Houses and Insanitary Dwellings Ordinance. 1894" were all built in compliance with the provisions of "The Public Health Ordinance, 1887," and of "The Building Ordinance No. 15 of 1889," or in compliance with the Ordinances for the time being in force, and upon completion the owners received the necessary certificates from the authorised Examining Officer and from the Surveyor General or other official whose duty it was to grant such certificates, but the houses were closed by the l'ermanent Committee of the Sanitary Board during the plagne epidemic last year, the Permanent Committee of the Sanitary Board claiming to have power to do so under the Bye-Laws made by them upon the 11th May and 31st May, 1894.
9.-Your Memorialists are advised that such bye-laws were not strictly in accordance with law, and that the subsequent action of the Permanent Committee in turning out the tenants, destroying all the internal fittings and closing the premises was illegal, but Ordinance No. 5 of 1894 was afterwards passed to remove doubts as to the validity of these bye-laws and your Memorialists are by no means desirous of seeing any purely technical objection raised to the action of the Sanitary Board in taking possession of and disinfecting the premises at a time when the Colony was being devastated by the Plague and when prompt measures had to be taken to prevent its further spread in the Colony.
3
10. The complaint that your Memorialists have to make with reference to the Permanent Committee is not that they improperly or acting ultra vires took possession of the above-mentioned premises, but that afterwards, when the premises referred to had been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected and when the Colony was free from plague, they refused to return them to the owners until the latter had agreed to give undertakings in writing as to the future occupation of such premises, which undertakings the Permanent Committée had no right whatever to demand, and which they have now by their action practically admitted to have been illegal, and with respect to which Section 16 of "The Closed Houses and Insanitary Dwellings Ordinance 1894," has now been passed.
11.-Your Memoralists are advised that but for the protection afforded to the Sanitary Board by the above-mentioned Section 16 the owners of the closed houses would undoubtedly have a legal claim against the members of that body for the damages they have sustained in consequence of their illegal action in refusing to allow them to reoccupy the premises after they had been cleaned and disinfected and were in a fit condition to be again inhabited, and they humbly submit to your Lordship that if the Colonial Government wishes to protect the members of the Sanitary Board from legal proceedings being taken against them by those who have suffered serious loss through their high-handed proceedings, the Government should itself take over the liability that has been incurred by the Sanitary Board, and that the whole Colony, for whose benefit and in whose interests the members of the Sanitary Board are considered to have been acting, should share equally with the individual owners of the premises closed the damages that have been suffered.
2
E
14
in
12.--Your Lordship will probably have been furnished with a report of the meeting of the Legislative Council at which "The Closed Houses and Insanitary Dwellings Ordinance, 1894," was passed, but as your Memorialists consider the remarks made by the learned Attorney-General when moving the second reading of the Bill as calculated to mislead those who are not intimately acquainted with the Colony and with the conditions upon which property in the City of Victoria is held, they trust your Lordship will pardon them if they quote a few of the phrases made use of by the Attorney-General and attempt to explain how they are calculated to unfairly prejudice the holders of the closed premises. The Attorney-General is reported to have said: "And I take it no one will gainsay that "this Council has a perfect right in its legislative capacity to say to any man in the Colony: You have no right to use your property in such a manner as to endanger "the lives and safety of your fellow colonists; you have no right so to use your place as to make it a hot-bed in which the germs of disease and plague which may be brought in from another place may thrive until they become a very dangerous thing to the Colony "and until we have the plague rampant in our midst,' and this Council has a right in its legislative capacity to say we will take that property away from you temporarily until you have restored it to a proper condition and that it shall be handed back to you "such a state that it will not be a public danger. For any man to say Compensate me "for having done so is absurd,'” With reference to the foregoing extract your Memorialists would remark that the owners of the closed houses have never asked to be compensated because their property was taken from them for the purpose of being put into a sanitary condition. They only ask that they should be compensated for the losses they have sustained through the absolutely illegal action of the Sanitary Board in refusing to returu A stranger to the Colony their property after it had been disinfected and cleaned. might naturally conclude that the premises mentioned in the Schedules to this Ordinance were the only premises cleaned and disinfected by the order of the Permanent Committee, whereas nothing would be more incorrect. To say nothing of the 348 houses in Taipingshau which were closed and have beeu forcibly resumed, the General Post Office, the Land Office and other Goverment buildings, as well as numerous business offices and stores in the centre of the City, were cleaned and disinfected for very cogent reasons and possession was at once given up by the Permanent Committee as soon as the disinfecting was completed, but because the Permanent Committee apparently considered that the Public Health Ordinance then in force was not sufficiently stringent as regards dwelling houses, they sought to make the owners of the closed houses personally undertake duties which were not laid upon them by law and which it was absolutely out of their power to properly give effect to.
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.