The container question: whose ground, shared among whom?
2026-07-18 · wave 2 · MECHANISM + MORAL lanes · opened by Floyd: "why should someone in Saskatoon be in financial relationship with someone in Vancouver?"
The question
The equal share divides "the nation's land value" by "the nation's people." Both choices are contestable. Land value could pool nationally, provincially, municipally — or globally. Each container is a different moral claim about who creates land value and who is owed it, and each produces very different cheques.
The principle that picks the container
Groundshare's own moral logic — you are owed what you didn't make but others charge you for — decomposes land value into layers with different creators:
| Layer of land value | Created by | Natural container |
|---|---|---|
| The raw site: soil, water, climate, minerals, location on Earth | Nobody (nature) | The widest community — logically the world; practically the nation |
| National framework value: rule of law, currency, national markets, immigration, interprovincial infrastructure | The national community | Nation |
| Regional/agglomeration value: the city's economy, transit, schools, safety, the neighborhood itself | The local community | Province / city |
So the honest answer is that no single container is "the" right one — the moral principle itself implies a layered share. A Vancouver lot's value is partly nature's (the harbor, the mountains — nobody's), partly Canada's (the country whose stability and openness made Vancouver a global city), and partly Vancouver's (the agglomeration Vancouverites built). Three different communities hold claims on the same parcel's rent.
The three pure stances (steelmanned)
1. National commons (the current draft). Citizenship is the relevant equality: every Canadian holds an equal claim to Canada's territory, because the national community — not the lucky local one — is what secures, legitimates, and opens the land. Saskatoon is in financial relationship with Vancouver already: Vancouver's land boom was fueled by national immigration policy, national banking, and buyers from across the country; a Saskatooner priced out of moving there has lost something real. The national container also mirrors how Canada already shares fiscal capacity (equalization) — and it maximally compresses the postal-code lottery of birth.
2. Community-created value (subsidiarity / the Henry George Theorem). Rent belongs to the community that creates it. The Arnott–Stiglitz Henry George Theorem is the formal version: at optimal city size, a city's aggregate land rent equals its spending on local public goods — i.e., urban rent is the shadow price of local amenities, so the city that generated it should capture and share it. On this view a national pool expropriates Vancouver's self-created value; Saskatoon has a claim on Saskatoon's rent, not Vancouver's. This stance also has teeth in Canadian law: natural resources are provincially owned under the constitution (s.109, s.92A) — Alberta's bitumen rent is Alberta's, and a national resource pool would require the provinces to surrender it (the National Energy Program grievance is the cautionary tale).
3. Cosmopolitan (Steiner's Global Fund). The nation is itself an arbitrary container — nature made no borders. Hillel Steiner's left-libertarian version has every person on Earth owed an equal share of natural-resource values, with nations that hold more than their share paying in. Canada, with ~$190k of land-and-resource value per resident, would be a large net payer to a global fund. Groundshare need not adopt this to acknowledge it: the same argument Floyd makes against the Vancouver landowner, a Bangladeshi can make against Canada. Honest position: the national container is a pragmatic horizon, not a moral stopping point — state it, don't hide it.
What the containers do to the money (directional, data to follow)
- National pool: transfers from high-land provinces (BC, Ontario) toward the rest. A Saskatoon renter and a Vancouver renter get the same ~$10k/yr; Vancouver homeowners are far likelier to be net payers. Maximum solidarity, maximum regional-grievance surface (this is equalization's politics, amplified).
- Provincial pools: each province settles internally. A BC renter's dividend would be much larger than a Saskatchewan renter's (BC's per-capita land value is far above Saskatchewan's) — which has its own logic: the BC dividend compensates for BC's cost of living, and a renter's dividend tracks the land prices they actually face. Alberta/Saskatchewan keep their resource rents (constitutionally realistic). But it entrenches the interprovincial birth lottery.
- City pools: the Henry George Theorem in action — Vancouver's rent funds Vancouver's amenities/dividends. Elegant locally; does nothing about regional inequality; and rural/low-rent areas get almost nothing.
- Layered (the synthesis): e.g., resource rents provincial (constitutional reality), the nature-given site layer national (nobody made it; the nation is the practical trustee), agglomeration increments local (HGT logic, could fund municipal goods before dividends). This is more complex but it is the only design where each dollar flows to the community that morally owns it.
Empirical note (next data task): decomposing land value by province requires provincial balance-sheet or assessment-roll data (StatCan's 36-10-0580-01 is national-only; BC Assessment and MPAC publish roll totals with land/improvement splits). Also needed: how much of a metro parcel's value is "site" vs "agglomeration" — the layered model's key empirical unknown, and a genuinely hard research question (a candidate for the academic program).
Addendum (w16): the container recurses
The BC municipal cut (analysis/bc-municipal-cut.md) measured a 22× spread in
per-capita residential value across BC's 159 municipalities — wider than the 6×
interprovincial spread. A provincial pool, proposed as the answer to
Saskatoon-vs-Vancouver, contains its own Fraser-Lake-vs-West-Vancouver at larger
amplitude. No container lacks an internal gradient; smaller boundaries relocate
the question rather than answer it. This materially strengthens the layered
design and weakens "provincial pools" as a principled stopping point.
Where this leaves the draft
Recommendation to Floyd (his call, logged as open):
- Keep the national container as the lead presentation — it is the simplest moral statement ("Canada's ground, every Canadian's share"), the most protective of the majority, and the version whose numbers we've verified.
- Add the container question to the site as an open question worked in public — it disarms the sharpest federalism objection (Alberta resources, Vancouver homeowners) by showing it's understood, and the layered design is a genuinely attractive endgame.
- Adopt one honest concession now: resource rents are provincially owned in law; any national resource pool is an interprovincial negotiation, not a parameter choice. Site copy should not imply otherwise.
- Queue the provincial decomposition and the site-vs-agglomeration split as ESTIMATE/ACADEMIC tasks.
Sources
- Arnott & Stiglitz (1979), "Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size," QJE 93(4) — the Henry George Theorem; see the wiki's treatment: https://www.progress.org/wiki/henry-george-theorem/
- Constitution Act, 1867 s.109; Constitution Act, 1982 s.92A — provincial ownership and control of lands and natural resources.
- Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights (1994); "The Global Fund: A Reply to Casal," J. Moral Philosophy 8:3 (2011) — the cosmopolitan container. https://philpapers.org/rec/STET_F-5
- Statistics Canada, Table 36-10-0580-01 — national aggregates used throughout; provincial decomposition queued (BC Assessment / MPAC roll data).