What is the equal share worth in Canada? (wave 1 — verified against live StatCan data)
2026-07-18 · ESTIMATE lane · supersedes the first-pass figures in proposal.md
Basis note (w18): superseded in two steps — resource flows (w13) and property-tax netting (w17). Current canonical figures:
NUMBERS.md.
The verdict on "$145,000"
The first-pass figure (≈$145k per resident) was an understatement, for three compounding reasons:
- Dated vintage. It used Common Wealth Canada's reading of StatCan's 2022 land value ($5.824T). The current vintage of the same table revises 2022 upward (the 2022 quarters now read $5.97T–$7.38T), and the series has since grown.
- Land only. It excluded Canada's non-land natural-resource wealth, which the same StatCan table carries as a separate line.
- Trough measurement. 2022 Q3–Q4 was the post-rate-shock low of the land series.
Current official figures (pulled directly from the tables, 2026-07-18)
Source: Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0580-01 (National Balance Sheet Accounts, market value, total all sectors), full-table CSV via the Web Data Service; population from StatCan quarterly demographic estimates (Table 17-10-0009-01, vector v1).
| Line | Q1 2026 value |
|---|---|
| Land | $6.493T |
| Natural resources excluding land | $1.369T |
| Natural Resources (incl. land, StatCan's own aggregate) | $7.862T |
| Population (2026-01-01) | 41,472,081 |
Recent quarters for context (Land): 2025Q1 $6.599T · 2025Q2 $6.568T · 2025Q3 $6.525T · 2025Q4 $6.369T · 2026Q1 $6.493T — flat-to-soft since 2022's revised peak.
Cross-checks: StatCan's Canada's natural resource wealth, 2024 release values energy + minerals + timber reserves at $1.362T for 2024 (energy 61%, minerals 28%, timber 11%) — consistent with the balance-sheet line. Household residential real estate (structures + land) was $8.45T at end-2025.
The equal share, recomputed
| Base | Total | Per resident (41.47M) | Family of four (stock) | Annual flow at r = 5.5% (per person) | Family of four (flow) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Land only | $6.49T | ≈ $157,000 | ≈ $626,000 | ≈ $8,600/yr | ≈ $34,400/yr |
| Land + natural resources | $7.86T | ≈ $190,000 | ≈ $758,000 | ≈ $10,400/yr | ≈ $41,700/yr |
Method notes, stated honestly:
- The 5.5% capitalization rate is CWC's long-term Canadian figure (their July 2023 revision); it is the conservative end. CWC's January 2023 growth-proxy method implies flows ~65% higher. The honest range for the land-only annual flow is roughly $357B (cap-rate) to ~$540B (growth-proxy) on current land values.
- Applying 5.5% to the resource-wealth stock is an approximation: StatCan's resource wealth is itself a net-present-value of future resource rents, so "stock × discount rate ≈ annual rent" only holds loosely. A better resource-flow number (actual royalty-equivalent rents by sector) is a follow-up task.
- Stock vs flow, for the site's framing: the share (~$190k) is an endowment; the settlement moves the flow (~$10k/person-yr). Both are true; leading with the per-family flow (≈$42k/yr for a landless family of four) communicates scale best.
Who pays? (Floyd's constraint: majority should not be net payers — let data decide)
By construction, net payers are only those holding more than the mean, and land wealth is right-skewed (mean > median), so a majority of people receive under any right-skewed distribution. The real questions the data must answer:
- Households, not persons. A Toronto/Vancouver homeowner household can plausibly sit above a household-level threshold even at median local income — the regional politics live here. Needed: land value held per household by wealth decile and region, from the Survey of Financial Security and StatCan's Distributions of Household Economic Accounts (real estate by quintile), with a land-share assumption per region (land fraction of home value is far higher in Vancouver than in Moncton).
- The land share of home value by region — needed to turn real-estate microdata into land microdata. Candidate sources: CMHC/teranet decompositions, municipal assessment splits (BC Assessment publishes land/improvement splits).
- Design levers if the household picture looks bad: per-resident shares stack per household (a family of four gets 4 shares — strongly protective for families); principal-residence partial shielding trades purity for politics; regional equalization does not exist in the pure scheme and should be modeled before being ruled in or out.
Next ESTIMATE wave: build the household-level incidence table (SFS/DHEA + regional land shares) and compute the actual share of households that are net recipients under (a) per-adult and (b) per-resident designs. Target: a real number to replace "most people receive."
Sources
- Statistics Canada, Table 36-10-0580-01, National Balance Sheet Accounts —
full-table CSV retrieved 2026-07-18 via WDS (
getFullTableDownloadCSV/36100580). Land $6.493T; Natural resources excluding land $1.369T; Natural Resources $7.862T (all 2026Q1, market value, total all sectors). - Statistics Canada, quarterly population estimates (v1): 41,472,081 at 2026-01-01, retrieved 2026-07-18 via WDS.
- Statistics Canada, The Daily — "Canada's natural resource wealth, 2024" (2025-11-20): $1,362B total; energy $833B (bitumen $622B), minerals $383B, timber $146B. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/251120/dq251120d-eng.htm
- Statistics Canada, The Daily — "National balance sheet and financial flow accounts, fourth quarter 2025" (2026-03-16): household residential real estate $8,450.6B. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/260316/dq260316b-eng.htm
- Common Wealth Canada, Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada (2023, both editions) — the 5.5% capitalization rate and the growth-proxy alternative; see the wiki's verified treatment: https://www.progress.org/wiki/natural-common-wealth-economic-rent-canada/