In development. Groundshare is a proposal being built in the open — the numbers below are first-pass estimates, clearly bounded, and the research program to test them is part of the project.
Groundshare·Natural Equity

The ground beneath us 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. Hold less than your share, and you're owed. Hold more, and you owe.


$7.9T
Canada’s land + natural-resource wealth (StatCan balance sheet, Q1 2026)
≈ $430B/yr
annual ground + resource rent at a 5.5% capitalization rate
≈ $190,000
the equal share, per Canadian resident — ≈$758,000 for a family of four
≈ $10,000/yr
what a resident holding no land would receive — ≈$42,000/yr for a landless family of four
Computed directly from Statistics Canada Table 36-10-0580-01 (land $6.49T + natural resources $1.37T, market value, Q1 2026) and the Q1 2026 population (41.5M), at Common Wealth Canada’s conservative 5.5% capitalization rate — the growth-based method gives flows ~65% higher. Full workings: analysis/canada-estimate.md in the repo.
The idea

One moral judgment. Then arithmetic.

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.

Try it — Canada defaults, adjustable
Net recipients (below the share) Net payers (above the share)
Why this is different

Predistribution, not redistribution.

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 coffee shop on the corner is worth more because the whole neighborhood exists around it. Nobody built the land. Groundshare names the thing that was always true but never had a word."— from the naming conversation, MMT Nemacolin, 2026
The receipts we intend to earn

A campaign that funds its own proof.

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:

Measure

What is Canada's land actually worth?

Reconcile StatCan's land aggregates with market evidence; publish the capitalization-rate sensitivity openly (the honest range today spans ~$320B–$530B of annual rent).

Distribute

Who holds it?

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.

Model

What happens to prices?

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.

Design

Can it be administered?

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.

Working in public

Open questions.

A proposal you can trust shows its unresolved seams. These are live, and the development log below tracks them:

The container

Whose ground — nation, province, or city?

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.

Who counts

Residents, citizens, adults, children?

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.

The rate

How much of the rent settles each year?

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.

Lineage

An old idea, finally named.

What we won't hide

Honest limits.

It raises no revenue

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 estimates are young

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.

Transition is real

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.

People are harder than parcels

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.

Progress

Development log.