Every Canadian deserves a stake in our nation’s progress.
Natural and publicly-created wealth should be publicly shared.
Canada’s housing crisis, weak productivity, and growing inequality share a common root: much of the wealth created by communities, public investment, and technological progress flows into the value of scarce assets instead of to the people who build, work, and power our economy. That can change.
We’re a think tank advancing:
Land value return
Putting our biggest asset to work. Return more publicly created land value to the public, so we can lower housing costs, reward building, boost productivity, and shift taxes off work and enterprise.
Sovereign wealth fund & dividends
Building common wealth for future generations. Invest Canada’s natural, public, and technological wealth in sovereign wealth funds that pay dividends and give every Canadian a stake in our common prosperity.
We’re active on social
Common Wealth Blog
B.C.’s Big Fix:
Shifting taxes to land
Solving our biggest challenges begins with the biggest asset in our economy: land.
Shifting taxes to land can help restore affordability and fairness — replacing anti-productive taxes on income and property, lowering housing costs, and better rewarding the workers and builders who power B.C.
Canada’s Sovereign Wealth Fund: Investing for Future Generations
Canada should have a sovereign wealth fund that invests our vast natural and public resources to benefit all Canadians and pay dividends. It would be a powerful tool to build generational wealth for all citizens, share the gains of innovation, and preserve the value of our natural commons.
Why shift taxes to land?
Land value is generated from the work and investments of the community around it, like public infrastructure and economic activity. We can capture and reinvest some of this publicly created value to fund tax relief for workers and builders; rebates to every household; and housing, transit, or other public needs. We call this land value return.
One way to do this is a land value tax (LVT), a levy on the value of land itself, excluding the buildings or improvements on it. Unlike taxes on income or buildings, which discourage work and construction, LVT doesn’t penalize productivity. It encourages efficient land use and development over idle speculation. That’s why economists often call it “the perfect tax”, one that could help address key drivers of the housing crisis. Variants of LVT have been successfully implemented around world including in Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, England, and Estonia.
How can LVT benefit the housing market and overall economy?
By shifting taxes onto land, away from income or buildings, we can realign incentives in our economy to:
build more housing and improve affordability
discourage anti-productive land speculation
increase returns to employment, business activity, and construction
For a quick primer, read the Land Value Tax One-Pager by the Center for Land Economics: “To spur housing growth, tax buildings less and land more”.
Explore Research Notes
The opportunity for Canada: a healthier housing market and fairer tax system that rewards the workers, businesses, and builders who power our economy.
Stewarding natural and public wealth to pay us dividends, so all Canadians have a stake in our success.
A Healthier Housing System
The Brief Case for Shifting Taxes to Land in Canada
How can shifting taxes to land be a fundamental solution to address inequality, combat the housing crisis, stimulate economic growth, and promote sustainable development? This article explores the rationale, benefits, design considerations, and challenges associated with implementing an LVT in Canada.
How Does Shifting Taxes to Land Improve the Housing Market?
A primer on how LVT can promote more housing, reduce speculative demand, and fix incentives that plague our housing system. In doing so, we could eliminate income tax for over 90% of Canadians or pay dividends to every household, while making homes cheaper.
Investing in all Canadians
A Sovereign Wealth Fund for Canada
We propose a sovereign wealth fund model that invests natural and publicly created wealth to benefit all current and future generations of Canadians. A $2T fund could generate $60-$90B/year to pay dividends to Canadians, and would be comparable to existing funds in smaller economies.
Economic Rents in Canada
In our inaugural report, we estimate the amount of economic rents (unearned profits) arising from Canada’s land and natural resources at over $240B/year, enough to pay every adult $7,500/year in dividends or eliminate income tax for 98% of Canadians.
What the experts are saying
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Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics and former Chief Economist of the World Bank
“Most of the increase in the value of wealth is an increase in the value of land… A tax on the return to land, and even more so, on the capital gains from land, would reduce inequality and, by encouraging more investment into real capital, actually enhance growth.”
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Professor Mariana Mazucato, economist and Founding Director of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose
“A citizen’s dividend allows the proceeds of co-created wealth to be shared with the larger community—whether that wealth comes from natural resources that are part of the common good or from a process, such as public investments in medicines or digital technologies, that has involved a collective effort.”
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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former President of Y Combinator
“The value of land appreciates because of the work society does around it: the network effects of the companies operating around a piece of land, the public transportation that makes it accessible, and the nearby restaurants, coffeeshops, and access to nature that makes it desirable… it’s fair for that value to be shared with the larger society”
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Professor Guy Standing, economist and Co-founder of Basic Income Earth Network
"Throughout history the commons have been a vital part of social income, providing a ‘right to subsistence’… We need to take back the commons, revive their principles of sharing, solidarity and universality, and ensure that commoners – ‘we, the people’ – are properly compensated for any loss.”
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Carys Roberts, Executive Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
“Everyone should collectively own a portion of [a country's] wealth. This would be held in one big fund so we can invest it sensibly so that everyone benefits fairly from the returns… By owning wealth in common, the fund would act as a force for economic equality by distributing returns to capital more widely.”
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Peter Barnes, entrepreneur, author and originator of "Cap-and-dividend"
“All persons have a right to income from wealth we inherit or create together. That right derives from our equality of birth... It consists of assets created not by individuals or corporations but by nature or society as a whole... paying dividends from wealth we own together is a practical, market-based way to assure the survival of a large middle class.”
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Andrew Yang, entrepreneur, former US Presidential Candidate and founder of the Forward Party
“Here is something you never hear when a company pays a dividend: 'What are the shareholders going to do with the money?' We are the owners and shareholders of this society… We need to take the bounty of the 21st century economy and return it to the people.”
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Jens Stoltenberg, Former Prime Minister of Norway and NATO Secretary General
“The natural resources in the ground, that’s something we own in common… we believe in the market, we believe in competition, we believe in open economy. But we believe that the extra rent connected to natural resources shall be something which is in the common ownership of the people”
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Frank de Jong, environmentalist, author and first leader of the Green Party of Ontario
“Funding government programs by capturing the community-generated, unearned income that accrues to desirable finite assets increases economic efficiency, eliminates poverty and unemployment, halts sprawl, conserves resources and reduces pollution.”
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Brent Ranalli, Research Scholar at Ronin Institute and author of "Common Wealth Dividends: History and Theory"
“There are some things in this world, like land and natural resources, that ought to be considered our common heritage, and that those who own or control these common-heritage resources owe some compensation to the rest of us who are excluded from their use.”
About Us
At Common Wealth Canada, our work is rooted in the idea that natural and publicly created wealth should be publicly shared. Policies reflecting this can fix key drivers of our housing crisis, replace harmful taxes on work and productivity, fund dividends to every citizen, and steward our finite resources for the benefit of future generations.
Members of our core team previously launched UBI Works, a Canadian nonprofit advancing basic income to mitigate the impacts of accelerating job automation and economic polarization.
Read our Introduction to Common Weath for basic income supporters →