Two pages, letter size — print double-sided, flip on long edge.
Groundshare·Natural equity

The ground is ours before it's mine.

Nobody built the land. Its value is created by all of us — the neighborhood, the roads, the town around the corner lot. Groundshare is a simple settlement of that fact: everyone holds an equal, natural equity in the nation's ground.

Nobody made the ground, and everybody makes it valuable. So everyone owns an equal share of what it's worth. Hold more than your share, you owe the difference. Hold less, you're owed. That's Groundshare.

One moral judgment, then arithmetic

  1. Nobody made the ground. Everything on it — house, shop, tower — somebody built, and it is rightly theirs. The ground was here first. Nobody can make more of it.
  2. Everyone makes it valuable. A downtown lot is worth millions; the same dirt three hundred kilometres out, almost nothing. The difference is everybody else.
  3. So its value is a shared inheritance. Every person holds an equal share by birth — natural equity. What you build is private equity; what nature and community provide belongs to each of us alike.
  4. Groundshare settles the account. Once a year: hold more ground-value than your share, you owe the difference. Hold less, you're owed. The state keeps nothing.
≈ $9,000/yr
every resident's share of the nation's ground rent
≈ $36,100/yr
a family of four holding no land — four full shares
4 of 5
wealth quintiles come out ahead, on StatCan's own accounts
$353–394B
settled each year, person to person — nothing kept by government
Not a tax. Every dollar in is a dollar out, citizen to citizen, on one visible schedule. Government keeps nothing — there is nothing to ratchet.
Not charity. It's income from property you already own — your share of the one asset nobody made. Paine called payments like this "a right, not charity."
floydm.ca/groundshare — the campaign, the numbers, and every working shown a proposal in open development · 2026
How the account settles

Your yearly settlement, in one line

Add up the nation's ground-rent. Divide by everyone — that's the equal share. Your statement is one number: the difference between the land value you hold and the share you're owed. Renters hold nothing and receive in full. Most homeowners hold less than they think — the building is yours untouched; only the ground counts.

The average renting household+ $21,400/yr They've paid for someone else's ground all their lives. The account, settled.
The average home-owning household+ $3,700/yr Most homes sit below the share. The first land reform where the median voter is on the receiving side.
The top wealth fifth & corporations− $11,700/yr avg A median Vancouver detached lot pays ≈ $49k. Companies hold no share — hiding land in one raises the bill.

What stays yours — without condition

  • Everything you build, earn, and save. Buildings, businesses, wages, savings: untouched. The line is the lot line.
  • Grandma's house. Any principal residence can defer entirely until the estate settles — machinery BC has run since 1974.
  • The family farm. Farm charges use farm rental value at use-value assessment — what a tenant neighbour already pays — deferrable until the land leaves farming. The farm household collects its shares in cash regardless.
  • The whole cheque. Built like the Canada Child Benefit: non-taxable, invisible to benefit clawbacks. Nobody takes it back through the side door.

Measured, not modeled

% of property value that is land — full 2026 city rolls
national ≈53% Surrey 78% Vancouver 75% Victoria 69% Montreal 38% Sherbrooke 30%

Same country, same dirt — the difference is everybody else. Where geography and zoning make ground scarce, it carries three-quarters of all property value. We parsed 1.4 million parcels to know.

Why you can trust the numbers

This project audits itself in public. Nine full city assessment rolls measured and published machine-readable · our own figures tested against vacant-lot benchmarks in both provinces that publish them — and they passed · all ten provinces' assessment practice field-checked · five self-corrections published the week each happened, including revising our own headline downward · an academic program designed so outsiders can break any claim — referees who succeed get thanked in public.

The honest parts, up front: land prices fall by design under a 20-year phase-in — the wealth changes form ($164,000 of natural equity per person), and most households come out ahead on announcement day. The genuine losers are large holders and recent leveraged buyers, who get the phase-in, a buyer's credit, and deferral. We publish who pays, not just who gains.

Read everything at floydm.ca/groundshare — the mechanism, the data, the objections we can only partly answer, and the dataset to attack us with. Groundshare · an idea, not a policy — yet