Interac, should be made the Canadian equivalent of PIX, managed by the central bank, competing with credit cards
Can crown make a cheaper internet company or is that against corpo rights or something? It would be nice if we have a cheaper option for phone and internet.
Rail.
Absolutely.
CN used to be a crown corp but was privatized in the 1990’s under Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives. Thatcherism and neoliberalism at its finest.
CP Rail has always been private.
It’s a key infrastructure that should definitely be publicly owned.
Via Rail is also a crown corp though.
Via Rail operations are at the mercy of CP and CN given their ownership (and lack of maintenance) of the tracks, though.
Precisely why CN needs to be re-nationalized. They’re in the way of getting half-decent passenger rail going.
I think Via needs to make substantial changes to become half-decent still, but that would still improve it.
Obviously telecom. We used to own our transatlantic cables, now we barely have one and we don’t own it.
That’s a very good point. Telecom infrastructure is so important. And because it’s privately owned, it’s not extended to every corner of Canada or in communities in far regions. We rely on things like Musk’s Starling to bring internet to northern communities.
When electricity was made public in Québec under René Levesque with Hydro Québec, the broken down private electricity production and distribution networks were fixed, updated and expanded across the province. It’s become the pride of Québec and a god damn good example of how these essential services need to be provided.
it’s not extended to every corner of Canada or in communities in far regions
Fuck dude, I live in a major metropolitan area and I still don’t have access to Fiber.
It’s become the pride of Québec*
* Not available in Sherbrooke, parts of Magog and parts of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. They have their own pride there! But that’s cool to!
The Coaticook MRC, MRC du Granit (and others) have their own fiber deployments!
About Sherbrooke:
En 1963, le gouvernement québécois réalise la nationalisation de l’ensemble des compagnies privées d’électricité sous l’égide d’Hydro-Québec. Comme cette nationalisation ne vise que les compagnies privées, les municipalités peuvent continuer d’administrer leur propre réseau. Cependant, depuis cette date, plusieurs municipalités ont cédé leurs installations à Hydro-Québec. Hydro-Sherbrooke est aujourd’hui le plus important réseau d’électricité municipal du Québec. La Ville de Sherbrooke supporte activement l’AREQ, soit l’Association des redistributeurs d’électricité du Québec, qui compte neuf réseaux municipaux et une coopérative d’électricité.
So those that were already public remained so, but are part of the association of electricity redistributors. They remain public. Only the private ones were nationalized under Hydro Québec.
Yeah exactly! Pretty cool, it’s not even a separate crown corporation or non profit, it’s just a municipal service. Sherbrooke also allowed some crypto farms to set up shop, but instead of rolling in the profits with the profits generated by Hydro Sherbrooke into the municipal budget, they created a separate wealth fund. One of the three dam is the oldest functioning dam in Quebec. Truth be told, they only produce around 8% of the electricity used by the city, the rest is purchased from HQ. But still a cool and unique model. Definitely something that would apply really fucking well to fiber deployments (and even other telecoms like cell towers)
bring back nortel! oh wait…
Cloud data storage and services.
That’s not essential. It’s very practical. But we can do without.
Too many government services use it.
We could, but right now we’re not and we have a whole lot of government shit backed up on Azure and likely AWS servers.
Food supply lines.
Yeah, I read in some other thread that the Canadian wheat board was Saudi owned. Here’s a source that confirms it. And of course it was Harper’s doing. This is essentially what made me ask this question here.
Food production and distribution should absolutely be owned by Canada. It’s insane that something so fundamentally important is at the mercy of foreiegn interests, especially those with whom we are now in a trade war.
How nobody did anything about this the entire time the Liberals were in power, and especially now, is mind boggling.
Anything that is considered a utility or necessary for the function of a nation state, including all schooling, health care and other socially important services.
Isn’t that already the case though? Aren’t hospitals and schools mostly public except for a few private ones?
Maybe make them ALL public and forbid any private for-profit health care and education facilities. This will force the more priviledged to invest in that system if they want the best service for themselves and their children.
Didn’t some Scandinavian country do this already?
schools mostly public except for a few private ones?
About those exceptions…
Public money shouldn’t be going to private schools.
If you want your kid to be in some elitist private school, you should pay the entire cost. Otherwise the public system is always an option.
Diverting public funds away from the public education system just weakens the public system.
Yeah, that’s what I was trying to say about some Scandinavian country.
In Finland it is forbidden to have private schools. All education is public. So if some rich family want what’s best for their kids, they’ll have to invest in the system like everybody else.
There’s a difference between hospitals being public and health care services being public. Drugs for chronic conditions. Dentistry. Optometry. Psychiatric services. Proper handling of transport costs for people not living in large cities who urgently need to see a specialist (Ontario’s reimbursement program for that is joke-worthy). Hospital equipment—constant fundraisers to replace things should not be required. There’s so much stuff that falls between the cracks under the current setup that really should be covered by the government.
Aaah OK I see your point. And, yes, I agree with you there.
How I read the question is what should be nationalised, not what else should be.
You are right.
I’ll start: Energy. Everything from oil/natural gas extraction, transformation, transportation and sales to nuclear enrichment, nuclear electricity production, hydro electricity production and distribution.
Here’s another: mineral extraction and lumber exploitation.
Loblaws and subsidiaries
How about subsidized grocery COOPs? Would that work?
No because of the distribution side. Unless the dustribution also goes COOP. But you asked for nationalization. Loblaws does both distribution and retail so narionalizing it solves the problem.
I’m going to give a bit of an odd one here.
Nobody in Canada should own land other than the federal government.
All land used by everyone should be leased from them.
This includes everything from the property with your home on it, to uranium mine, to national parks. Everything.
I’d only want this if we did election reform to any variant of ranked choice voting federally, mandated it for provincial and municipal elections as well and somehow enshrined this in the charter that no subsequent government can change this. We should also have ten year terms mandated. 4-5 years is too little for proper long term planning.
Would of course need a couple more safeguards preventing that I can’t think of, but either way, I would not want a dictatorship to take away land for itself with malice.
And then we attract pricks into the federal government who ignore rules and they evict everyone overnight so that they can build a resort for themselves.
Look, I get the sentiment, but this sort of centralization is scary.
I mean… they can already evict people from land they privately own. It’s called “expropriation” and it happens fairly regularly in Canada.
Not sure why this would change anything related to that.
Then how would your proposition change anything, except that the government would have even less reason to pay private citizens after forcing them to move?
It changes the money part of the equation. You could no longer sell your land because you wouldn’t own it. The government is the beneficiary of any land value appreciation, not private investors.
I don’t think that really answers the question and feels like a nothing burger. There would be no land appreciation when it’s all owned by the government. Its value is purely perceived and never realized in such a scenario.
And to be fair, land is somewhat of an interesting case. Suppose you own a piece of land and have no debtors, but you’ve died without descendants or relatives, and certainly without a will, wouldn’t the government just take over that? In essence, the government has a holding on the land, and you’re holding an indefinite lease that can be transferred. Expropriation is simply a mechanism for the government to take back the lease, but they are still obligated to pay to owners. To the owners, it sucks, cause you might really like the piece of land, or that your livelihood depends on it. Hence the conversation should be about fair compensation or equivalent exchange, and a strong scrutiny of expropriation (provably worthy investments being done by the government).
That said, that does depend on your political beliefs on individual freedom. I believe that we should have the freedom to be where we want and do what we want, but to the extent where it doesn’t cause others pain, discomfort, or jeopardy of any sorts (physical, mental, societal where appropriate), or when there is something that would benefit us, collectively. Being asked to move, and being paid fairly to do so, is annoying and disruptive, but if all we do is reject every attempt of improving public spaces and infrastructure projects, then I think we have a more serious problem than just land ownership.
Of course, every case of expropriation should be fully scrutinized. Do these people HAVE to move? There are many ways to incorporate existing infrastructure with new ones.
I simply don’t believe or trust that governments will forever be benign, and full ownership of land by only the government is no different from the age of kings: all it takes is one bad king to ruin it all.
Even in an anarchic society, there’s still a sense of ownership of space: this is where I can be alone by myself, and that my right to privacy in my space is respected.
There is land value, it’s reflected in the amount the government charges the lessee. A property downtown is not going to have the same monthly lease value as a property in the suburbs for the same land size. This changes over time as areas become more or less desirable.
I also don’t believe that the government is perfect, but I do think they’re still better than private landlords who are showing how un-trustworthy they are as we live and breath.
As for your “anarchic society”, you’re actually not correct in this assertion. Large-scale personal ownership of land was uncommon historically, though of course it depends on where and when you look.
The roman empire had private land ownership, but only for a small people. Very few people owned their own land or home.
England was the same, a bunch of lords and dukes and shit. Lots of peasants that didn’t own even the shit from the animals.
If you look at First Nations cultures in North America pre-European contact there was no private ownership at all, it was all collective for the tribes. The Aztec empire was the same, collective ownership by groups.
Tracking the ownership of a plot of land for a lot of people requires a lot of bureaucracy and centralized systems to track it, along with citizenship rights, which simply didn’t exist in most places.
Yah, that couldn’t get abused.
Everything can get abused.
The question is more is it better or worse than what we currently have. Right now, private landlords are evicting people pretty constantly for no-fault reasons like landlord-use and “redevelopment”.
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Eeeh… I dunno. I kind of disagree with that one. I think it’s important to allow people to own their own piece of land. Otherwise everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government and I don’t like that idea.
Limiting how much land people can own though… Like how many residential properties. That I could go for.
Land ownership is already a fiction in Canada.
If I buy a book, it’s mine to do what I want with, for as long as I want.
If I buy real estate, the government still gets to say what I do on/with it, and can take it away if they decide they really want it, or if I stop paying them property taxes. That doesn’t sound like ownership; it sounds like a rental agreement.
Of course there should be guidelines. You shouldn’t be able to use your property as a dumping ground for waste for example. And the taxes pay for the infrastructure that allows you to reach your land, to link it to the water network, to collect waste, etc.
“everyone can risk being evicted from their home by the government”
A) The government already has a tool to do that, in Canada it’s called “expropriation” and they happen fairly regularly.
B) That’s actually a feature of this system. People buying up land and never leaving is actually one of the major problems with our current real estate prices. In areas of high demand, if the government just terminated leases and then forced those properties to be developed we wouldn’t have the pricing issues we have now. Does this hurt people? yes, but also not nearly as much. Given that property would be much more affordable under such a scheme moving elsewhere wouldn’t be nearly as difficult.
I understand your point. But I’m worried about government abusing this.
Yeah you can be expropriated, but usually you either get a fair compensation or have legal tools to defend yourself to a certain extent no?
I think my problem is that I have a certain fear of not being able to own my own piece of land because it’s the most essential things to own. It’s your own little part of the world where you are in control.
The First Nations never had our concept of owning land. The land owns us. So we should respect it - or it will all end up looking like a strip mine eventually.
I can’t argue with you there.
I often think about what life here would be like if there never had been any colonization. I wonder what society here would be like.
It’s not essential at all, plenty of people never own property in their life. Especially these days with condos, the concept of owning the land is rather irrelevant since you don’t really own a specific part of it, just an interest in a shared property that you have very little individual say over.
You WANT your own little piece of land, and that’s fair enough, but currently our system of ownership is causing problems for a lot of other people who want a place to live too but just happen to have been born too late to afford it reasonably.
100% agree. Private, inheritable land ownership in the context of a population that doesn’t all enter the game at the same time with the same resources available to them is inherently unjustifiable.
YES YES YES. Use LVT to replace one of the awful taxes Canadians gripe about (maybe GST, maybe income tax?)
100% replace income taxes.
Plus, a lot of property taxes and other local/regional usage income can be rolled up into the lease payments. What matters is how those leases are calculated, such that small/cheap properties for the working poor lease for almost nothing, but a McMansion (or actual mansion) would lease for a massive amount.
In my opinion, almost ALL taxes should be rolled into this, including most income taxes. Remove all the income tax brackets below 2x the median income, and roll that amount into these lease costs. Working families should essentially get net 0, and people who own a McMansion and are retired just pay more for the privilege or sell it and downsize like they should.
including most income taxes.
Conditionally agree, except for the immediate effect of income taxes themselves: they are deducted straight from payroll, every time payroll happens, so they are taken on a much more frequent basis and before the paycheque is ever received by the worker.
This means that the worker does not need to allocate anything out of their paycheque towards those taxes because in most cases those taxes have already been fully paid. This dramatically lowers the cognitive load for the worker, who already has significant cognitive loads by virtue of their socioeconomic status.
So there is a downside to that method that I would seek to eliminate or dramatically smooth over so that the working class don’t have yet another brick to trip over in their lives.
This could be ameliorated by having “payroll” (and if need be, even time cards themselves) run through a CRA server that does all calculations and demands a certain amount of money from the employer such that wage theft (aside from tips and a few other things) is almost completely eliminated.
Any employer wanting to dispute when an employee clocked in needs to provide evidence that the employee lied about when they walked in. Government-provided time clocks could then accept standard-issue ID as evidence that the employee clocked in, as any normal person wouldn’t want to just give away their ID, and the employee could track everything through the CRA’s website. Even employee scheduling could be run through this, allowing the CRA to ding employers seeking to game the system for financial gain.
There are many options possible, we just need to engineer the entire system to benefit the working class and (rightly!) treat the employers as the adversarial and untrustworthy belligerents that they are. We could even engineer an entire “worker resources” division which protects the worker against employer depredations, instead of protecting the company at the expense of the worker.
It really isn’t more cognitive load, your payroll taxes go down, but your mortgage/rent goes up. For a lot of working class people, it would actually work out in their favour and they’d end up seeing more net money in their account.
lol people would go wild if that was even muttered on the news
I agree, but it needs to still be talked about.
People still think we can build our way into affordable homes, which is impossible. Alternatives like this would actually deliver affordable housing, but you’re right that a lot of people would be unhappy about it.
no, this would not pass, a small minority might be ok with, but the vast majority of millennials and gen Z/Alpha would shoot this down
Why? Most of those groups don’t even own property, and many aren’t ever likely to be able to afford it.
There’s some pretty pissed off young people out there.
government taking control of land where you live = communism to the general public.
That’s an education problem. The government already controls the land.
listen i get yall think your very smart and if you really are that’s great, but you have to swallow the pill and realize there are people who don’t concern themselves with technicalities of every day life or their country. To them, when they buy land, they think they now own it, and not the country. Positioning this as “The government owns the land and rents the houses” will make people spin their heads 5 times over and go “what the fuck no way are we allowing that, that sounds like socialism/commie”
Its all fine and dandy discussions happen on here or reddit about what the government should do or this law or that, but the vast majority of Canadians just don’t have the time or interest to look into things like the average user on here does. Why do you think populist leaders do so well in elections, like doug ford? he talks in plain common words and points, no complicated language that people go “oh this ““nerd”” is talking again”.
