this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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I'm going to give a bit of an odd one here.
Nobody in Canada should own land other than the federal government.
All land used by everyone should be leased from them.
This includes everything from the property with your home on it, to uranium mine, to national parks. Everything.
And then we attract pricks into the federal government who ignore rules and they evict everyone overnight so that they can build a resort for themselves.
Look, I get the sentiment, but this sort of centralization is scary.
I mean... they can already evict people from land they privately own. It's called "expropriation" and it happens fairly regularly in Canada.
Not sure why this would change anything related to that.
Then how would your proposition change anything, except that the government would have even less reason to pay private citizens after forcing them to move?
It changes the money part of the equation. You could no longer sell your land because you wouldn't own it. The government is the beneficiary of any land value appreciation, not private investors.
Eeeh.... I dunno. I kind of disagree with that one. I think it's important to allow people to own their own piece of land. Otherwise everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government and I don't like that idea.
Limiting how much land people can own though... Like how many residential properties. That I could go for.
"everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government"
A) The government already has a tool to do that, in Canada it's called "expropriation" and they happen fairly regularly.
B) That's actually a feature of this system. People buying up land and never leaving is actually one of the major problems with our current real estate prices. In areas of high demand, if the government just terminated leases and then forced those properties to be developed we wouldn't have the pricing issues we have now. Does this hurt people? yes, but also not nearly as much. Given that property would be much more affordable under such a scheme moving elsewhere wouldn't be nearly as difficult.
I understand your point. But I'm worried about government abusing this.
Yeah you can be expropriated, but usually you either get a fair compensation or have legal tools to defend yourself to a certain extent no?
I think my problem is that I have a certain fear of not being able to own my own piece of land because it's the most essential things to own. It's your own little part of the world where you are in control.
The First Nations never had our concept of owning land. The land owns us. So we should respect it - or it will all end up looking like a strip mine eventually.
I can't argue with you there.
I often think about what life here would be like if there never had been any colonization. I wonder what society here would be like.
Will it? I'd say the land I own looks a lot more cared for than the thousands of acres of Crown land that's right up against my yard. My land gets tended to regularly, the trees and grass are cared for, the weeds are taken out and the deer and bears still get to walk across it and the birds and squirrels still live in the trees. No strip mines in sight.
Good for you. The problem is that not all landowners have the same commitment.
Land ownership is already a fiction in Canada.
If I buy a book, it’s mine to do what I want with, for as long as I want.
If I buy real estate, the government still gets to say what I do on/with it, and can take it away if they decide they really want it, or if I stop paying them property taxes. That doesn’t sound like ownership; it sounds like a rental agreement.
Its true. Ultimately all land in Canada is ultimately owned by the Crown and can be expropriated at the gov's desire and no citizen can stop it, no matter what. We do have good laws around being fairly compensated, but you still lose your home, no matter how much you've invested in it or how many generations your family has lived on it. My brother in law just lost his because of a new highway coming right through his house. Yes, he got paid out, but its really hard to see 20 years of hard work and a house you built taken away for a road.
Of course there should be guidelines. You shouldn't be able to use your property as a dumping ground for waste for example. And the taxes pay for the infrastructure that allows you to reach your land, to link it to the water network, to collect waste, etc.
100% agree. Private, inheritable land ownership in the context of a population that doesn't all enter the game at the same time with the same resources available to them is inherently unjustifiable.
WHERE in life is anyone promised 'the same resources'? My dad was a poor farmer. My friend's dad was a multi millionaire owner of a thriving business. No one gets the same start. But you start with what you've got and work to improve your life if you want.
Uh, nowhere? That's why private, inheritable land ownership is unjustifiable. There is no way to make such a system fair when tomorrow you will have a child who is born who will be orphaned and another who will be the beneficiary of land inheritance, neither child being responsible for the conditions they were born into. Yet both are expected to compete for the same resources. We can do much better.
Plus, a lot of property taxes and other local/regional usage income can be rolled up into the lease payments. What matters is how those leases are calculated, such that small/cheap properties for the working poor lease for almost nothing, but a McMansion (or actual mansion) would lease for a massive amount.
In my opinion, almost ALL taxes should be rolled into this, including most income taxes. Remove all the income tax brackets below 2x the median income, and roll that amount into these lease costs. Working families should essentially get net 0, and people who own a McMansion and are retired just pay more for the privilege or sell it and downsize like they should.
Conditionally agree, except for the immediate effect of income taxes themselves: they are deducted straight from payroll, every time payroll happens, so they are taken on a much more frequent basis and before the paycheque is ever received by the worker.
This means that the worker does not need to allocate anything out of their paycheque towards those taxes because in most cases those taxes have already been fully paid. This dramatically lowers the cognitive load for the worker, who already has significant cognitive loads by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
So there is a downside to that method that I would seek to eliminate or dramatically smooth over so that the working class don’t have yet another brick to trip over in their lives.
This could be ameliorated by having “payroll” (and if need be, even time cards themselves) run through a CRA server that does all calculations and demands a certain amount of money from the employer such that wage theft (aside from tips and a few other things) is almost completely eliminated.
Any employer wanting to dispute when an employee clocked in needs to provide evidence that the employee lied about when they walked in. Government-provided time clocks could then accept standard-issue ID as evidence that the employee clocked in, as any normal person wouldn’t want to just give away their ID, and the employee could track everything through the CRA’s website. Even employee scheduling could be run through this, allowing the CRA to ding employers seeking to game the system for financial gain.
There are many options possible, we just need to engineer the entire system to benefit the working class and (rightly!) treat the employers as the adversarial and untrustworthy belligerents that they are. We could even engineer an entire “worker resources” division which protects the worker against employer depredations, instead of protecting the company at the expense of the worker.
YES YES YES. Use LVT to replace one of the awful taxes Canadians gripe about (maybe GST, maybe income tax?)
100% replace income taxes.
Yah, that couldn't get abused.
Everything can get abused.
The question is more is it better or worse than what we currently have. Right now, private landlords are evicting people pretty constantly for no-fault reasons like landlord-use and "redevelopment".
You must be in ON, cause I can assure you that in provinces where the Landlord-Tenant board actually functions, like Alberta, thats NOT happening. Its not a Canadian problem, its largely an ON and BC problem and the reason its a problem in those two provinces is because of their restrictive rent controls. They SOUND like a good idea at first but when the rubber hits the road, you cant tell a landlord they can only raise the rent by 2% when inflation has been rising by 4% to 8% and expect them not to use any means possible to raise the rent. Maintenance goes up, supplies go up, appliances go up, trades go up, taxes go up, insurance goes up, but the landlord can only absorb so much and then something's gotta give and 2% doesnt cut it.
Here in Alberta we can raise the rent by any reasonable amount we like and it works. Rents go up in times of shortage but they also go down when there is an oversupply. So in the last year, the rents in Calgary have DROPPED by 9% because there have been a lot of new rentals come on the market. It works. Rent controls do not.
BC.
Rent controls don't work, I agree. As do most economists.
The rents in Calgary haven't dropped because of new rental supply though, you have that idea wrong, the rents have dropped because the economy is down. Rents are down in Vancouver too by almost 7%. The supply has barely changed in either location.
Everyone keeps talking about supply solving the issue, but the market keeps actually changing because of demand, it's impossible to build enough supply fast enough to impact the markets significantly, only by changing the demand can you have a significant impact.
Which is where the government owning the property comes in, the demand for housing isn't actually coming from people needing places to live. It's from investors who are buying up properties because they know that people HAVE to live somewhere. If the government owned the land, that speculation goes away almost entirely because it's no longer profitable. The land values all drop off a cliff, and housing becomes affordable again.
If there's one thing we don't lack in Canada, it's space. The problem is the allocation of it, when Bob and Jane own 3/4 of an acre downtown, and live in their 5 bedroom place by themselves now that the kids all left. That's the problem. Fuck them, force them to either pay to have that privledge or give up the property so it can be redeveloped to fit 8 families. If they want 3/4 of an acre they can live outside the city.
I'd only want this if we did election reform to any variant of ranked choice voting federally, mandated it for provincial and municipal elections as well and somehow enshrined this in the charter that no subsequent government can change this. We should also have ten year terms mandated. 4-5 years is too little for proper long term planning.
Would of course need a couple more safeguards preventing that I can't think of, but either way, I would not want a dictatorship to take away land for itself with malice.
I've said this like a dozen times in the comments. A dictatorship can ALREADY take away your land if they wanted to. The Canadian government expropriates land from private citizens all the time.
lol people would go wild if that was even muttered on the news
I agree, but it needs to still be talked about.
People still think we can build our way into affordable homes, which is impossible. Alternatives like this would actually deliver affordable housing, but you're right that a lot of people would be unhappy about it.
"which is impossible"
I beg to differ. In Alberta, three years ago I bought a home for 65,000. Two months ago I bought another one for 60,000. The second one needs some love but it's livable. I'm currently building a small alleyway home by combining two used buildings and the final cost will be under 30,000.
It IS possible - with some sweat equity - but not in Toronto or Vancouver, thats for sure.
So you buying places where nobody wants to live and doing all the construction yourself is somehow proof that it's possible to build affordable housing for everyone?
Give your head a shake.
no, this would not pass, a small minority might be ok with, but the vast majority of millennials and gen Z/Alpha would shoot this down
Why? Most of those groups don't even own property, and many aren't ever likely to be able to afford it.
There's some pretty pissed off young people out there.
government taking control of land where you live = communism to the general public.
That's an education problem. The government already controls the land.
listen i get yall think your very smart and if you really are that's great, but you have to swallow the pill and realize there are people who don't concern themselves with technicalities of every day life or their country. To them, when they buy land, they think they now own it, and not the country. Positioning this as "The government owns the land and rents the houses" will make people spin their heads 5 times over and go "what the fuck no way are we allowing that, that sounds like socialism/commie"
Its all fine and dandy discussions happen on here or reddit about what the government should do or this law or that, but the vast majority of Canadians just don't have the time or interest to look into things like the average user on here does. Why do you think populist leaders do so well in elections, like doug ford? he talks in plain common words and points, no complicated language that people go "oh this ""nerd"" is talking again".