PW...you may be correct, but expropriation, is a time consuming exercise...a very delicate matter, as the heavy hand of government seizing property is not an every day event, and as well, eminent domain is for the common good, a difficult task, I suggest....how do you convince the Toronto voters that spending 500 milion to seize KWGs land, so that a large American company can build a private road....don't think it will float...

The term "eminent domain" was taken from the legal treatise De Jure Belli et Pacis, written by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius in 1625,[2] which used the term dominium eminens (Latin for supreme lordship) and described the power as follows:

"...The property of subjects is under the eminent domain of the state, so that the state or he who acts for it may use and even alienate and destroy such property, not only in the case of extreme necessity, in which even private persons have a right over the property of others, but for ends of public utility, to which ends those who founded civil society must be supposed to have intended that private ends should give way. But it is to be added that when this is done the state is bound to make good the loss to those who lose their property."

Some U.S. states use the term appropriation (New York) or "expropriation" (Louisiana) as synonyms for the exercising of eminent domain powers.