Common Wealth Canada

Overview

Common Wealth Canada is a Canadian nonprofit think tank that advocates capturing economic rent — the unearned value of land and natural resources — through a national land value tax, and channelling the proceeds into a sovereign wealth fund that would pay dividends to Canadians. Its core argument is that natural and publicly created wealth (land value driven up by public infrastructure and community growth, and the value of shared natural resources) should be publicly shared rather than privately captured.[1]

The organisation grew out of the same team that built UBI Works, a national basic-income advocacy network. According to Common Wealth Canada, after finding that dividend-from-shared-wealth arguments were being conflated with poverty-alleviation arguments for basic income, the team created a separate organisation to make the "pre-distribution" case on its own terms.[2] The exact founding date of Common Wealth Canada is not independently confirmed; its earliest public research output is dated January 2023 [VERIFY: precise founding date/legal registration].

Leadership

• Floyd Marinescu — founder and primary funder of Common Wealth Canada. He is also CEO and co-founder of C4Media (InfoQ, QCon) and the founder of UBI Works.[3]
• Ken Yang — Director, focused on "post-AI economics and policy"; a co-author of the organisation's flagship 2023 economic-rent report.[3][4]

[VERIFY: full roster of staff, board, and advisors — the organisation's team page could not be independently retrieved at time of writing.]

Research Program

Common Wealth Canada positions itself as a research-first advocacy organisation, publishing quantitative studies rather than only making the moral case for land value taxation.

• "Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada" (2023), co-authored by Ben Earle, Liam Wilkinson, Floyd Marinescu, and Ken Yang, estimates Canada's total annual economic rent — from land, minerals, oil and gas, forestry, fisheries, and the electromagnetic spectrum — at roughly $421 billion/year, of which about $241 billion/year is judged collectible as new public revenue without discouraging productive investment. The report further estimates that a national land value tax capturing three-quarters of the annual rental value of Canada's land would raise on the order of $194 billion/year and, under the report's modelling, reduce land prices substantially.[4]
• "Assessing the Distributional Impacts of a Land Value Tax Coupled with Income Tax Reform" (2024), by Liam Wilkinson, models the incidence of a national LVT combined with income-tax changes. It finds that an LVT alone is, by their modelling, largely regressive — particularly when paired with a larger basic personal income-tax exemption — but that these effects are substantially offset by a flat refundable tax credit, which the study estimates would leave roughly 80% of households better off. The paper concludes that a negative-income-tax or guaranteed-income design paired with LVT revenue may be more progressive than an income-tax-cut pairing.[5]
• "Modeling the Price Reaction to the Implementation of a Land Value Tax" (2024) works through the parameter choices, assumptions, and sensitivity of the organisation's land-price model — cap rates, capture-rate scenarios from 0–100%, and demand-elasticity adjustments — underlying its headline price-reduction estimates.[6]
• "B.C. Has Been Here Before: The Long History of Land Value Taxation in British Columbia" (see the full British Columbia place page) documents that by 1914 roughly two-thirds of B.C. municipalities had adopted some form of site- or land-value taxation, and that Vancouver operated a form of land value tax from 1910 to 1984. It argues that BC Assessment, created in 1974 to independently value land and improvements province-wide, leaves British Columbia uniquely well-positioned — among Canadian provinces — to reintroduce land value taxation, a claim developed further in the organisation's "BC's Big Fix" proposal.[7]

The Common Wealth Fund Proposal

Alongside the tax-reform research, Common Wealth Canada proposes a sovereign wealth fund — modelled loosely on funds such as Norway's and Alaska's — that would invest the proceeds of land value taxation and other rent-capture policies on behalf of current and future Canadians, paying out a citizen's dividend over time. The organisation's own materials sketch an illustrative long-run fund on the order of $2 trillion, capable of generating tens of billions of dollars a year in dividend income; these are the organisation's own projections and should be read as advocacy-stage estimates rather than independently verified forecasts.[8]

Role in the Canadian Georgist Landscape

Common Wealth Canada is part of a newer, quantitatively oriented wave of Georgist-adjacent organisations — comparable in style to the U.S.-based Center for Land Economics — that emphasize original modelling and policy-ready numbers over general education. It is, as of this writing, the most active Canada-specific research and advocacy voice for land value taxation, and has focused particular attention on British Columbia because of that province's unusual land-and-improvement assessment infrastructure. Its work sits alongside older, education-focused Georgist bodies such as the Henry George School and the international International Union for Land Value Taxation, but is distinguished by its combination of tax-incidence modelling, a sovereign-wealth-fund dividend proposal, and direct policy engagement in Canadian provincial politics.

See Also

• Floyd Marinescu
• Canada
• Land Value Capture · Resource Rents · Citizen's Dividend · Land Value Tax · Center for Land Economics

Sources

1. Common Wealth Canada — official site. commonwealth.ca — used for the organisation's mission statement and general framing of land/resource rent as shareable common wealth.
2. Common Wealth Canada, "Basic Income alleviates poverty. Common Wealth proposes a better way to share and preserve Earth's riches." commonwealth.ca/basicincome — used for the organisation's account of its split from UBI Works messaging.
3. Ken Yang, LinkedIn profile ("Director @ Common Wealth Canada") and Common Wealth Canada speaker/team materials. linkedin.com/in/kenyang-jdmba — used for leadership identification; corroborating detail on Floyd Marinescu's role via Common Wealth Canada's public bios and podcast appearances (e.g. Viewpoints podcast, "Better wealth distribution in Canada, with Floyd Marinescu"). [VERIFY: primary organisational bio page could not be fetched directly.]
4. Common Wealth Canada, "Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada" (2023), authors Ben Earle, Liam Wilkinson, Floyd Marinescu, Ken Yang. commonwealth.ca/report (PDF: commonwealth.ca/s/Natural-Common-Wealth-and-Economic-Rent-in-Canada_Jan-2023.pdf) — used for authorship and the $421B/$241B/$194B economic-rent and LVT-revenue estimates.
5. Common Wealth Canada, "Assessing the Distributional Impacts of a Land Value Tax Coupled with Income Tax Reform" (2024), Liam Wilkinson. commonwealth.ca/research/distributional-impacts — used for the regressivity finding and the refundable-credit mitigation result.
6. Common Wealth Canada, "Modeling the Price Reaction to the Implementation of a Land Value Tax: A discussion of parameter selection, assumptions, and sensitivity" (2024). commonwealth.ca/research/lvt-sensitivity-analysis — used for the modelling methodology (cap rates, capture-rate scenarios, elasticity assumptions).
7. Common Wealth Canada, "B.C. Has Been Here Before: The Long History of Land Value Taxation in British Columbia." commonwealth.ca/blog/history-of-bc; see also "BC's Big Fix: Land Value Tax," commonwealth.ca/bc-lvt — used for the BC historical claims (1914 municipal adoption, Vancouver 1910–1984, BC Assessment est. 1974) and the BC policy proposal.
8. Common Wealth Canada, "Canada's Sovereign Wealth Fund: Investing for Future Generations." commonwealth.ca/fund — used for the Common Wealth Fund proposal and its illustrative fund-size/dividend figures.

Note on sourcing: commonwealth.ca could not be fetched directly during this review (the site returned an access-denied response to automated retrieval); the above is reconstructed from search-engine indexing of the site's own pages and third-party coverage. Figures and quotes are the organisation's own claims about its research and should be read as an advocacy source's account of its own work (per the wiki's source-quality hierarchy), not as independently adjudicated findings. A follow-up direct-fetch pass is recommended once site access is available. [VERIFY: all commonwealth.ca figures above against the primary PDFs directly.]