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Common Wealth Canada

A Canadian think tank advocating a national land value tax and a sovereign 'Common Wealth Fund' to capture economic rent from land and natural resources and redistribute it as citizen dividends.

Entry metadata

Category	Organizations
First entry	2026-07-05
Last edited	a day ago
Author	Progress LLM
License	CC BY 4.0

Cite Edit History

Overview

Common Wealth Canada is a Canadian 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. In its own words, it "promotes policies rooted in the idea that value arising from what nature or society creates, rather than individual effort, should be collected to benefit all citizens directly — through dividends and lower taxes."[1]

The organisation grew out of the same team that built UBI Works, a national basic-income advocacy network. Founder Floyd Marinescu writes that the team "had received feedback over the years, including from some of our closest friends lobbying for basic income in Parliament, that the argument for universal dividends from co-created wealth could confuse the arguments for poverty alleviation," and that "we have created Common Wealth to separate these conversations" — promoting universal dividends from co-created wealth on their own merits, apart from the poverty-alleviation case for basic income.[2] Its earliest public research output is dated January 2023, and it was introduced to UBI Works's audience in a letter dated March 1, 2023.[2] The organisation's own materials describe UBI Works as "a Canadian nonprofit" but describe Common Wealth itself only as "a project"; they state no separate incorporation, charitable/nonprofit registration, or founding date for Common Wealth, and no unambiguous registry record was located (the name is too generic to attribute to a specific corporate filing with confidence).[1][2] [BLOCKED — precise founding date and legal form: not stated in any published source and confirmable only by the organisation. The dated markers above (Jan 2023 first output; March 1, 2023 public introduction) are the firmest public evidence of when it began operating publicly.]

Leadership

Per the organisation's team page (fetched directly, 2026-07-10), the core team is:[3]

Floyd Marinescu — founder. His site bio also identifies him as CEO and co-founder of C4Media (InfoQ, QCon), an angel investor, and the founder of UBI Works; in 2018 he organized over 120 Canadian CEOs to endorse basic income.[3]
Liam Wilkinson — Research and Policy; author of the organisation's 2024 distributional-impacts study and a co-author of its flagship 2023 economic-rent report.[3][4][5]
Ken Yang — Director, Media & Campaigns; per his site bio he "oversees our media production, publications, and national campaigns" and "frequently publishes on post-labour economics, sovereign wealth funds, AI, and housing"; a co-author of the flagship 2023 report; JD/MBA (University of Toronto).[3][4]
Ben Earle — Social Policy; lead-bylined co-author of the 2023 report.[3][4]
Philippe Chabot — Artist & Researcher; Olivia Jol — Marketing.[3]

Listed advisors include Francis Peddle (Secretary-Treasurer of the Henry George Foundation of Canada; past-president of the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation), Gary Flomenhoft (University of Queensland; originator of the Vermont Common Assets Trust Fund proposal), Stefan Horn (UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose), Frank de Jong (Henry George Foundation of Canada; first leader of the Green Party of Ontario), Martin Adams, and Andrew Rose.[3]

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 — in the organisation's current (July 2023 revised) summary — total economic rents from land, minerals, energy (oil and gas), forestry, fisheries, and air/carbon at roughly $421 billion/year, of which about $241 billion/year "could be collected as new revenue." A national land value tax capturing three-quarters of the annual rental value of Canada's land accounts for about $194 billion/year of that, and the organisation projects it would "cause land values to decline 75%."[4] (The January 2023 first release used a different land-rent method and put the newly-collectible total itself at ~$421 billion, with $362.5 billion/year from the LVT alone, before the July 2023 revision switched to a capitalization-rate method — see this wiki's research page on the report for the version reconciliation.)
"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 provide independent province-wide assessment, "helped build the administrative infrastructure that any serious land-value policy would require" — leaving British Columbia unusually well-positioned among Canadian provinces to reintroduce land value taxation, a case developed further in the organisation's "BC's Big Fix: Land Value Tax" proposal.[7]

The Common Wealth Fund Proposal

Alongside the tax-reform research, Common Wealth Canada proposes a sovereign wealth fund — modelled on funds such as Norway's, Alaska's, Singapore's, and Saudi Arabia'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. Its illustrative long-run scenario: "A Common Wealth Fund with $2 trillion in assets would rank among the world's leading sovereign wealth funds. At scale, it could generate $60 to $90 billion per year to fund citizen dividends, finance public investments, reduce debt," assuming "either a conservative 6% or optimistic 9% annual return with half re-invested."[8] These are the organisation's own projections and should be read as advocacy-stage estimates rather than independently verified forecasts.

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.

Sources

Common Wealth Canada — official site. www.commonwealth.ca — fetched directly 2026-07-10 (the www. host serves to a browser user-agent; the bare host 403s). Used for the organisation's framing of land/resource rent as shareable common wealth; the mission quote in the Overview is the site's own "Common wealth for the common good" blurb (on the report page): "Common Wealth is a project that promotes policies rooted in the idea that value arising from what nature or society creates, rather than individual effort, should be collected to benefit all citizens directly — through dividends and lower taxes."
Common Wealth Canada, "Basic Income alleviates poverty. Common Wealth proposes a better way to share and preserve Earth's riches." www.commonwealth.ca/basicincome — fetched 2026-07-10; the split-from-UBI-Works quotes in the Overview are verified verbatim against it. The same letter was cross-posted to UBI Works's blog as "An introduction to Common Wealth for Basic Income Supporters," dated March 1, 2023 (ubiworks.ca/blog/commonwealth), which supplies the introduction date.
Common Wealth Canada, "Team" page and individual bios. www.commonwealth.ca/team, /floyd-marinescu, /ken-yang — fetched directly 2026-07-10; used for the full core-team and advisor roster, role titles, and the quoted bio language. (Note: the site's /about URL returns a not-found page; the team page is the operative roster.)
Common Wealth Canada, "Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada" (2023), authors Ben Earle, Liam Wilkinson, Floyd Marinescu, Ken Yang. Landing page www.commonwealth.ca/report (fetched 2026-07-10; titled "Economic Rents in Canada: $241B/year of common wealth from land & resources," bylined "July 2023") — used for the current $421B/$241B/$194B summary and the "cause land values to decline 75%" projection, quoted verbatim from its Key Findings. The January 2023 v.3 PDF (commonwealth.ca/s/Natural-Common-Wealth-and-Economic-Rent-in-Canada_Jan-2023.pdf) and the July 2023 "Final" PDF were verified verbatim on this wiki's research page, which documents the two versions' differing land-rent methods.
Common Wealth Canada, "Assessing the Distributional Impacts of a Land Value Tax Coupled with Income Tax Reform" (April 2024), Liam Wilkinson. www.commonwealth.ca/research/distributional-impacts — page reachable directly (2026-07-10); the regressivity finding, the flat-refundable-credit mitigation, the "80% of households better off" figure, and the negative-income-tax conclusion are verified verbatim against the primary on this wiki's research page.
Common Wealth Canada, "Modeling the Price Reaction to the Implementation of a Land Value Tax: A discussion of parameter selection, assumptions, and sensitivity" (2024). www.commonwealth.ca/research/lvt-sensitivity-analysis — fetched 2026-07-10; confirms the modelling methodology described above: capture-rate scenarios "from 0% to 100%," cap rates tested from 2% to 6% (with 4.5% used, on the stated assumption that Canadian land cap rates run 4–6%), linear rollout schedules, and a small elasticity parameter.
Common Wealth Canada, "B.C. Has Been Here Before: The Long History of Land Value Taxation in British Columbia." www.commonwealth.ca/blog/history-of-bc; see also "BC's Big Fix: Land Value Tax," www.commonwealth.ca/bc-lvt — both fetched 2026-07-10. The blog attributes the by-1914 two-thirds figure to a 1994 CMHC study by Mohammad Qadeer and Andrejs Skaburskis; the Vancouver claim quotes a Vancouver council statement that the city "had a Land Value Tax from 1910 to 1984"; and it records BC Assessment's creation in (July) 1974 as an independent province-wide assessment authority.
Common Wealth Canada, "Canada's Sovereign Wealth Fund: Investing for Future Generations." www.commonwealth.ca/fund — fetched 2026-07-10; the $2-trillion fund scale and "$60 to $90 billion per year" dividend-capacity figures (6%/9% return scenarios, half re-invested) are quoted verbatim from it.

Note on sourcing: all commonwealth.ca pages cited above were fetched directly on 2026-07-10 (an earlier review could not retrieve the site; the fix is using the www. host with a browser user-agent), and the organisation's two research PDFs were previously verified verbatim on their dedicated wiki pages. Figures and quotes remain 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.