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.

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’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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cloud data storage and services.

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.

Yah, that couldn’t get abused.

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

that’s one way to loose voters

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.

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.

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.

That’s not essential. It’s very practical. But we can do without.