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.
Everything on it — the house, the shop, the tower — somebody built, and it is rightly theirs. The ground underneath was here before any of us. Nobody worked for it. Nobody can make more of it.
A vacant lot downtown is worth millions; the same lot three hundred kilometres away is worth almost nothing. The difference isn't the dirt — it's the neighborhood, the roads, the schools, the country around it. Land value is created by everyone and collected by whoever holds title.
If nobody made it and everybody's presence gives it value, no one can have a better claim to it than another. Each person holds an equal share by birth: what you build is private equity — what nature and community provide is natural equity.
Add up what the nation's ground is worth. Divide by everyone. Hold more than your share, you owe the difference each year; hold less, you're owed. Not a tax — the government keeps nothing. Not charity — it's income from property you already own.
And everything you earn, build, and save stays entirely, unconditionally yours.
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 now a specified research program — six falsifiable questions with data and methods, pre-registration and adversarial review as standing rules, and a commissionable working-paper skeleton (academic-path.md in the repo). The four that matter most:
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, the nation's, the city's — and each implies a different pool. The stakes are now measured: residential value per person runs ~$354k in BC vs ~$60k in New Brunswick (a 6× spread), the median Vancouver detached home would pay ~$54k/yr (land share now measured from the parcel roll: ~85% in single-family zones), and the median Toronto detached home sits at break-even. Provincial pools entrench that lottery; the national pool makes the metros the engine. The endgame may be layered shares; the lead presentation stays national for now.
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.
Land prices fall by design — under a 20-year phase-in, a Vancouver detached home ≈−53%, the average Canadian home ≈−33%. The wealth isn't destroyed, it changes form: each person gains a claim worth ≈$190k, so most households get wealthier on announcement day. The genuine casualties — recent leveraged buyers, above-share holders — get the phase-in, a recent-buyer credit, and deferral. Workings: analysis/transition-path.md.
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.
We had said BC and Ontario both publish land/improvement splits. Checked: BC does (measured, W9) and Quebec does (required by regulation, open data) — Ontario's MPAC computes land values but publishes only the total. Corrected everywhere, and it yields the campaign's first concrete ask: Ontario should publish the number it already computes. In the repo: analysis/assessment-readiness.md.
Our headline had annuitized the $1.37T resource stock at 5.5% (≈$75B/yr); measured extraction rents run ≈$35B/yr. The honest answer is the range — ≈$390–430B/yr total, ≈$9,400–$10,400 per person — now quoted with the conservative anchor first, and carbon pricing kept as its own layer rather than folded in. In the repo: analysis/resource-rent-flows.md.
Twelve waves of rulings in one specification: the settlement equation, who counts, why entities get no share, how assessment and deferral work, the transition recommendation, and administration in one paragraph — with a parameters table separating what's settled from the three decisions that are Floyd's. In the repo: mechanism.md. The package's research phase is complete; deepening continues.
We had claimed most family farms sit below the crossover. Measured, that's wrong: the average Canadian farm holds ≈$4.0M of land — above-share in every province. The correction is published, and the design answer is explicit: charges set by farm rental value at use-value assessment (~what tenant farmers already pay), fully deferrable while the land stays in farming, with every farm household receiving its shares. In the repo: analysis/farm-cut.md.
The price path computed under every instrument: immediate (≈0% of land value — rejected), 10/20/30-year phase-ins (20%/37%/49%), grandfather-until-sale (rejected for Prop 13 lock-in, with the evidence). The wealth-conversion identity: most households gain net worth on announcement day because the citizen claim (~$190k/person) exceeds their land-price loss. Binding constraint found: the mortgage channel ($2.4T against $4.7T of household land). Working recommendation: 20-year phase-in + recent-buyer credit + deferral. In the repo: analysis/transition-path.md.
City of Vancouver's open parcel roll (228,190 records, 2026 roll): land is 75% of all property value city-wide and ~85% in single-family zones — the assumed band was conservative. The median detached Vancouver payment firms up to ≈$54k/yr; the condo majority stays on the receiving side; and the wave-3 incidence table is confirmed to understate progressivity. In the repo: analysis/vancouver-land-share.md.
CHSP assessment data pulled: median Vancouver detached ($1.7M) would pay decisively; median Toronto detached ($738k) straddles break-even; provincial per-capita residential value spans 6× (BC $354k, NB $60k). The container question now has price tags. In the repo: analysis/regional-cut.md.
The narrative kit: voice rules operationalized from the naming conversation ("an idea, not a policy"), the one-breath and ten-year-old versions, yard-sign lines, the 90-second seminar defense, audience keys, and one-liners for all eight objections — every line bound to the measured numbers and the conceded limits. In the repo: narrative-kit.md.
Six falsifiable research questions with data and method — annual rent measurement, household incidence from microdata, renter pass-through, the price path on announcement, site-vs-agglomeration, behavioral neutrality — plus credibility rules (pre-registration, open code, adversarial review, disclosed funding) and a commissionable working-paper skeleton. In the repo: academic-path.md.
The four-step natural-equity argument — no numbers required — now leads the page. In the repo: the full one-pager with its philosophical scaffolding (Locke's proviso, Smith, Paine, George, Steiner), the deliberate phrasing choices, and an honestly-open section on Indigenous title, to be written with Indigenous collaborators, not about them (moral-case.md).
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.