this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
39 points (95.3% liked)
Canada
10678 readers
389 users here now
What's going on Canada?
Related Communities
🍁 Meta
🗺️ Provinces / Territories
- Alberta
- British Columbia
- Manitoba
- New Brunswick
- Newfoundland and Labrador
- Northwest Territories
- Nova Scotia
- Nunavut
- Ontario
- Prince Edward Island
- Quebec
- Saskatchewan
- Yukon
🏙️ Cities / Local Communities
- Anmore (BC)
- Burnaby (BC)
- Calgary (AB)
- Comox Valley (BC)
- Edmonton (AB)
- East Gwillimbury (ON)
- Greater Sudbury (ON)
- Guelph (ON)
- Halifax (NS)
- Hamilton (ON)
- Kingston (ON)
- Kootenays (BC)
- London (ON)
- Mississauga (ON)
- Montreal (QC)
- Nanaimo (BC)
- Niagara Falls (ON)
- Niagara-on-the-Lake (ON)
- Oceanside (BC)
- Ottawa (ON)
- Port Alberni (BC)
- Regina (SK)
- Saskatoon (SK)
- Squamish (BC)
- Thunder Bay (ON)
- Toronto (ON)
- Vancouver (BC)
- Vancouver Island (BC)
- Victoria (BC)
- Waterloo (ON)
- Whistler (BC)
- Windsor (ON)
- Winnipeg (MB)
Sorted alphabetically by city name.
🏒 Sports
Hockey
- Main: c/Hockey
- Calgary Flames
- Edmonton Oilers
- Montréal Canadiens
- Ottawa Senators
- Toronto Maple Leafs
- Vancouver Canucks
- Winnipeg Jets
Football (NFL): incomplete
Football (CFL): incomplete
Baseball
Basketball
Soccer
- Main: /c/CanadaSoccer
- Toronto FC
💻 Schools / Universities
- BC | UBC (U of British Columbia)
- BC | SFU (Simon Fraser U)
- BC | VIU (Vancouver Island U)
- BC | TWU (Trinity Western U)
- ON | UofT (U of Toronto)
- ON | UWO (U of Western Ontario)
- ON | UWaterloo (U of Waterloo)
- ON | UofG (U of Guelph)
- ON | OTU (Ontario Tech U)
- QC | McGill (McGill U)
Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.
💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales
- Personal Finance Canada
- Buy Canadian
- BAPCSalesCanada
- Canadian Investor
- Canadian Skincare
- Churning Canada
- Quebec Finance
🗣️ Politics
- General:
- Federal Parties (alphabetical):
- By Province (alphabetical):
🍁 Social / Culture
- Ask a Canadian
- Bières Québec
- Canada Francais
- Canadian Gaming
- EhVideos (Canadian video media)
- First Nations
- First Nations Languages
- Indigenous
- Inuit
- Logiciels libres au Québec
- Maple Music (music)
Rules
- Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.
Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
I don’t think that really answers the question and feels like a nothing burger. There would be no land appreciation when it’s all owned by the government. Its value is purely perceived and never realized in such a scenario.
And to be fair, land is somewhat of an interesting case. Suppose you own a piece of land and have no debtors, but you’ve died without descendants or relatives, and certainly without a will, wouldn’t the government just take over that? In essence, the government has a holding on the land, and you’re holding an indefinite lease that can be transferred. Expropriation is simply a mechanism for the government to take back the lease, but they are still obligated to pay to owners. To the owners, it sucks, cause you might really like the piece of land, or that your livelihood depends on it. Hence the conversation should be about fair compensation or equivalent exchange, and a strong scrutiny of expropriation (provably worthy investments being done by the government).
That said, that does depend on your political beliefs on individual freedom. I believe that we should have the freedom to be where we want and do what we want, but to the extent where it doesn’t cause others pain, discomfort, or jeopardy of any sorts (physical, mental, societal where appropriate), or when there is something that would benefit us, collectively. Being asked to move, and being paid fairly to do so, is annoying and disruptive, but if all we do is reject every attempt of improving public spaces and infrastructure projects, then I think we have a more serious problem than just land ownership.
Of course, every case of expropriation should be fully scrutinized. Do these people HAVE to move? There are many ways to incorporate existing infrastructure with new ones.
I simply don’t believe or trust that governments will forever be benign, and full ownership of land by only the government is no different from the age of kings: all it takes is one bad king to ruin it all.
Even in an anarchic society, there’s still a sense of ownership of space: this is where I can be alone by myself, and that my right to privacy in my space is respected.
There is land value, it's reflected in the amount the government charges the lessee. A property downtown is not going to have the same monthly lease value as a property in the suburbs for the same land size. This changes over time as areas become more or less desirable.
I also don't believe that the government is perfect, but I do think they're still better than private landlords who are showing how un-trustworthy they are as we live and breath.
As for your "anarchic society", you're actually not correct in this assertion. Large-scale personal ownership of land was uncommon historically, though of course it depends on where and when you look.
The roman empire had private land ownership, but only for a small people. Very few people owned their own land or home.
England was the same, a bunch of lords and dukes and shit. Lots of peasants that didn't own even the shit from the animals.
If you look at First Nations cultures in North America pre-European contact there was no private ownership at all, it was all collective for the tribes. The Aztec empire was the same, collective ownership by groups.
Tracking the ownership of a plot of land for a lot of people requires a lot of bureaucracy and centralized systems to track it, along with citizenship rights, which simply didn't exist in most places.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It really isn't more cognitive load, your payroll taxes go down, but your mortgage/rent goes up. For a lot of working class people, it would actually work out in their favour and they'd end up seeing more net money in their account.
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.
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.
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.