Common Wealth Canada · 458 Fairall St · Ajax, ON L1S 1R6 · Canada: https://www.commonwealth.ca/
| Hi , It is a straightforward proposition: taxing land can mean that our hard-earned income is taxed less, that homes are cheaper to buy, that our economy is more productive, and that we all benefit from the value our communities create together. Our mission is to share the evidence for this simple truth and advance the policies that will make it a reality. In pursuit of this goal, after many events, meetups and community calls earlier this year, this summer saw the Common Wealth team busy with new research efforts and collaborations. We published an op-ed in the Toronto Star with Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin We released a new distributional impact paper for a hypothetical LVT in Canada and are working on refining that model for British Columbia. We held our first meetup in Toronto. We booked the former Alaska State Senate President, Rick Halford for our forthcoming inaugural podcast. If you want to know more about our mission and all that we’ve been up to, read on.Notable Publication. In June we collaborated with Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist at the real estate company Redfin, to write an opinion piece for the Toronto Star. In it, we describe how our tax system rewards land appreciation and penalizes development, the very opposite of what we want in a housing crisis. Read the article Research and Development Our BC Policy Project We are currently working on a project to craft a realistic and attainable land value tax policy option and transition plan for British Columbia. This enormous undertaking has us building on the past work of Georgists and land-taxers from around the world. Its goal is to present Canadians with a clear choice between an unjust and inefficient status quo and a future where homes are affordable and communities share in the value they create. Why BC? Presently, the province is the only jurisdiction in Canada to separately value and report land values in their property assessment regime, making it the perfect place to demonstrate the benefits of land values taxes with a high degree of accuracy and confidence. Side note: One of the reasons BC has this system was due to the tireless work of Georgists in the 70s. One champion in that movement, former BC MLA and Cabinet Minister Bob Williams recently passed away. From his obituary in the Vancouver Sun: His public policy vision was grounded in the writings of Henry George, the radical American economist who influenced the progressive movement in the late 19th and early 20th century.George argued that the economic value of land and resources be treated as the common property of society and subjected to a single tax to achieve a more productive and just society.…[His memoir] delights in recounting how he briefed post-communist-era Russian mayors on how to set up a private land ownership registry on the B.C. Assessment model. An LVT that leaves all households better off The early numbers from this work are (unsurprisingly) extraordinarily promising. It turns out that if you tax land fairly there is more than enough value to benefit nearly all citizens and make the economy more efficient to boot. Using some newly acquired data from Statistics Canada, we were able to parse out the impacts on homeowners and renters independently. The numbers below reflect a significant shift to LVT but you can expect a much more detailed report on this and a more incremental version in the weeks to come.   Simplifying the Case for LVT One of our recent publications, The Brief Case for Land Value Tax in Canada, seeks to summarize and simplify why and how we should tax land. Bottom line – it is a fundamental solution to the main driver of inequality, the housing crisis, and economic stagnation. Shoutout from Schalkenbach One of the preeminent land-tax advocates, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, recently wrote a series about Universal Basic Income. In one article they reference our plan for funding a universal dividend with land taxes as a way of recycling community assets. Read it here Advocacy & Community Building If you haven’t checked out commonwealth.ca in a while, we completed a bit of a refresh on our homepage. We wanted to make it perfectly clear what our vision is and why it is worth pursuing. Meetups July saw us host our first in-person meetup in Toronto. It was incredibly inspiring and invigorating to listen to and collaborate with folks looking to make the housing market work a little better. We heard from former Toronto Mayoral Candidate Chloe Brown on why she ran on a land tax proposal and also broke off into smaller groups to discuss the various dynamics of common wealth ideas. Live Podcast Recording. Thursday, September 26 3:30 PM Eastern / 12:30 PM Pacific Register now! We took a little hiatus from our normal pace of community call delivery, but we’re coming back with a great alternative. In two weeks we’ll be hosting a call with Dr. Jack Hickel from the Alaska Permanent Fund Defenders and Former Alaska State Senate President, Rick Halford. The Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests state oil revenues and pays dividends to residents, is a rare expression of communal wealth recognition in our modern economy — but it is under attack. Come hear from some of its most vocal proponents and imagine with us what a similar system could look like in Canada. We’re trying out a different format to our traditional zoom call and we’ll be conducting this session as a live podcast. Hopefully this will be the first of many but sign up now to attend the inaugural recording live! Follow us online. |