What business domains, services, organizations should be nationalized to ensure Canadian sovereignty?
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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.
Yah, that couldn’t get abused.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Cloud data storage and services.
That’s not essential. It’s very practical. But we can do without.
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Isn’t that already the case though? Aren’t hospitals and schools mostly public except for a few private ones?
Maybe make them ALL public and forbid any private for-profit health care and education facilities. This will force the more priviledged to invest in that system if they want the best service for themselves and their children.
Didn’t some Scandinavian country do this already?
schools mostly public except for a few private ones?
About those exceptions…
Public money shouldn’t be going to private schools.
If you want your kid to be in some elitist private school, you should pay the entire cost. Otherwise the public system is always an option.
Diverting public funds away from the public education system just weakens the public system.
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schools mostly public except for a few private ones?
About those exceptions…
Public money shouldn’t be going to private schools.
If you want your kid to be in some elitist private school, you should pay the entire cost. Otherwise the public system is always an option.
Diverting public funds away from the public education system just weakens the public system.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say about some Scandinavian country.
In Finland it is forbidden to have private schools. All education is public. So if some rich family want what’s best for their kids, they’ll have to invest in the system like everybody else.
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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”.
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YES YES YES. Use LVT to replace one of the awful taxes Canadians gripe about (maybe GST, maybe income tax?)
100% replace income taxes.
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that’s one way to loose voters
lose, not loose.
And you’re right, for now, currently more families own than not. That balance is changing though, as property prices are being pushed out of reach of entire generations. If you look at the percentages of home ownership at a certain age milestones and compare by generation it’s dropping pretty fast.
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including most income taxes.
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.
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lose, not loose.
And you’re right, for now, currently more families own than not. That balance is changing though, as property prices are being pushed out of reach of entire generations. If you look at the percentages of home ownership at a certain age milestones and compare by generation it’s dropping pretty fast.
sorry, unsure why, but for the past while my typing has been horrible and i’m mistyping words. dunno if it’s related to my IIH.
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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.
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That’s not essential. It’s very practical. But we can do without.
We could, but right now we’re not and we have a whole lot of government shit backed up on Azure and likely AWS servers.
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That’s not essential. It’s very practical. But we can do without.
Too many government services use it.
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Can crown make a cheaper internet company or is that against corpo rights or something? It would be nice if we have a cheaper option for phone and internet.
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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.
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.
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Interac, should be made the Canadian equivalent of PIX, managed by the central bank, competing with credit cards
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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”.
What’s more, the Expropriation Act (Expropriation and You - pdf warning) means a sufficiently malicious government already has the power to abuse people in this way should it want to.
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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.
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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.
