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. Hold less than your share, and you're owed. Hold more, and you owe.
Divide the nation's land value by its people: that's the equal share. Each year, everyone settles the difference between what they hold and what they're owed — at a modest rate, in one payment. No new bureaucracy of programs. No taxing anyone's work, savings, or business. What you build is yours; the ground it stands on was always ours.
A renter receives their full share of the nation's ground rent. A typical homeowner — who holds less land value than the national average — receives a smaller cheque. Large landholders pay in. And this is now measured, not assumed: on Statistics Canada's own distributional accounts, four of five wealth quintiles come out ahead — only the wealthiest fifth pays (≈−$13k/yr for its average household). The average renter household would receive ≈$24,000/yr; the average owner household still receives ≈$4,000/yr. An average-size household starts paying only above ≈$456,000 of land held — roughly an $870,000 property. And because a quarter of Canada's land is held by corporations and governments — which get no share and pay full freight — the household side comes out $176B/yr ahead in aggregate.
Taxes take what someone earned and hand it to someone else. Groundshare doesn't touch what anyone earned — it settles title to value none of us produced. That's why the payments aren't welfare and aren't charity: they're property income from an asset every person is born holding. Thomas Paine said it in 1797 — a ground-rent-funded payment is "not charity but a right."
The schedule is one straight line through the equal share — no brackets, no phase-outs, no cliff. Holding one more dollar of land costs the same modest rate whether you're above or below the line, and land can't move offshore, hide, or quit working. Economists have called land the one thing you can capture value from without distorting anything — Milton Friedman called the land value tax "the least bad tax." Groundshare is that mechanism, minus the word "tax": the same line, drawn as a settlement between citizens.
The estimates on this page trace to Statistics Canada's balance sheet and to analysis by Common Wealth Canada — an advocacy organization, and honest about it. Advocacy numbers are where a movement starts, not where it rests. Groundshare's second track is a research program to put the core claims in front of independent economists, with data and methods that can survive peer review:
Reconcile StatCan's land aggregates with market evidence; publish the capitalization-rate sensitivity openly (the honest range today spans ~$320B–$530B of annual rent).
Estimate land value held per household by decile from the Survey of Financial Security — the number that determines exactly who receives and who pays, replacing illustrative distributions.
The settlement itself deflates speculative land prices toward use value — which shrinks the pool the schedule draws on. Model the equilibrium honestly instead of quoting today's prices forever.
Persons, not parcels: attribution of entity-held land, an allowance design borrowed from income-tax machinery, and what Detroit's credit-based LVT plan teaches about netting in practice.
A proposal you can trust shows its unresolved seams. These are live, and the development log below tracks them:
Why should Saskatoon be in financial relationship with Vancouver? A parcel's value has layers: nature's (nobody made the harbor), the nation's (law, markets, immigration), the city's (the agglomeration locals built). Each layer implies a different pool — and Canada's constitution already makes resource rents provincial. The endgame may be layered shares; the lead presentation stays national for now: simplest moral claim, most protective of the majority.
Per-resident shares stack per household — a family of four holds four shares, which strongly protects families. Per-adult shares are bigger per cheque but thinner per household. Citizens-only vs all residents changes both the moral story and the math.
At 5.5% the full rent moves and holding idle land yields nothing; lower rates phase in gently. The rate is the one technical dial the moral case can't set by itself.
"Ground-rents" — value that goes to the landlord class though the community creates it. Ground-rents → ground-share.
Every proprietor owes the community a ground-rent; the payments funded by it are a right, not charity.
Land value is created by community and nature; rent is common property. The intellectual foundation — Groundshare is the name it never had.
The negative income tax: receive below a threshold, pay above it. Groundshare borrows the shape — and removes the kink, because land can't stop working.
Everyone is entitled to an equal share of natural-resource values; those holding more than their share pay in. Stated for nations — Groundshare states it for neighbours.
The Permanent Fund Dividend: proof that a resource-rent dividend can run for four decades and stay wildly popular.
Payments in equal payments out — it's a settlement among citizens, not government funding. The classic Georgist program replaces taxes on work; Groundshare deliberately trades that away for simplicity and moral clarity. Hybrids exist.
The Canada figures rest on one organization's analysis of StatCan data, with a method the authors themselves revised downward by ~46%. That's why the research program exists.
Large landholders bear a real capitalized loss when this begins. Phase-ins, deferral for asset-rich/cash-poor seniors, and grandfathering are design work, not footnotes.
Attributing corporate- and trust-held land to persons is the scheme's main administrative cost. Workable answer so far: entities get no allowance and pay the full rate.
The eight strongest attacks — transition shock, the asset-rich/cash-poor widow, "it eats its own base," assessment, gaming, socialism, homevoters, the family farm — each given its best form, then answered with evidence or honestly conceded. Two stay open on purpose. In the repo: objections.md.
StatCan's distributional accounts, joined to the balance sheet: four of five wealth quintiles are net recipients; only the wealthiest fifth pays on average. Average owner household: still +$4,000/yr. Crossover ≈ $456k of land held. Workings in the repo (analysis/household-incidence.md).
Nation vs province vs city, worked through in public: the layered-value analysis, the Henry George Theorem case for local pools, the constitutional reality that resource rents are provincial, and the cosmopolitan horizon. Full analysis in the repo (analysis/container-question.md).
Pulled Statistics Canada's balance sheet directly: land $6.49T + natural resources $1.37T (Q1 2026), 41.5M residents → the equal share rose from a first-pass $145k to ≈$157k (land) / ≈$190k (land + resources) per resident. Workings in the repo (analysis/canada-estimate.md).
The settlement mechanism (one straight line, no kink), the prior-art lineage from Smith to Steiner, the honest-limits list, and this site.