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.

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.

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.

That’s an education problem. The government already controls the land.

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.

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”.

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’s not extended to every corner of Canada or in communities in far regions

Fuck dude, I live in a major metropolitan area and I still don’t have access to Fiber.

It’s become the pride of Québec*

* Not available in Sherbrooke, parts of Magog and parts of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. They have their own pride there! But that’s cool to!

The Coaticook MRC, MRC du Granit (and others) have their own fiber deployments!

About Sherbrooke:

En 1963, le gouvernement québécois réalise la nationalisation de l’ensemble des compagnies privées d’électricité sous l’égide d’Hydro-Québec. Comme cette nationalisation ne vise que les compagnies privées, les municipalités peuvent continuer d’administrer leur propre réseau. Cependant, depuis cette date, plusieurs municipalités ont cédé leurs installations à Hydro-Québec. Hydro-Sherbrooke est aujourd’hui le plus important réseau d’électricité municipal du Québec. La Ville de Sherbrooke supporte activement l’AREQ, soit l’Association des redistributeurs d’électricité du Québec, qui compte neuf réseaux municipaux et une coopérative d’électricité.

Source

So those that were already public remained so, but are part of the association of electricity redistributors. They remain public. Only the private ones were nationalized under Hydro Québec.

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 mean, the easy way around this is just to jack up property taxes so high that there’s no real difference between you owning it and you renting it from the government.

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’s not essential at all, plenty of people never own property in their life. Especially these days with condos, the concept of owning the land is rather irrelevant since you don’t really own a specific part of it, just an interest in a shared property that you have very little individual say over.

You WANT your own little piece of land, and that’s fair enough, but currently our system of ownership is causing problems for a lot of other people who want a place to live too but just happen to have been born too late to afford it reasonably.

You are right.

that’s one way to loose voters

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.

Cloud data storage and services.

YES YES YES. Use LVT to replace one of the awful taxes Canadians gripe about (maybe GST, maybe income tax?)