Collaborative Proposal Creation
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Proposal text
The Green Party of Canada believes that all people have equal rights to nature.
To deliver these rights, a Green government will shift away from conventional taxation. Instead, it will enact resource pricing (like carbon pricing) that minimizes - and compensates the public for - pollution, resource extraction, and land use.
Type of Proposal
Public policy that the party would represent
Objective / Benefit
Conventional land law has created a vicious cycle of worsening inequality as landowners collect rent which they don't create, which empowers them to buy even more land, thus concentrating ever more land in ever fewer hands. This could be fixed by capturing rent and redistributing it to society.
Furthermore, most existing taxes - like income, business, and sales taxes - inhibit beneficial economic activity.
After replacing those taxes with taxes on land, natural resources, and pollution, more wealth will be produced using less land, fewer natural resources, and less pollution.
It all starts with declaring that Earth is humanity's common wealth.
If your proposal replaces an existing policy or policies, which one does it replace?
The first four paragraphs of G10-P002 Green Tax Reform. To replace the fifth paragraph of G10-P002, see Financial Incentives for Ecological Restoration: Financial Incentives for Ecological Restoration
List any supporting evidence for your proposal
🔰Common Wealth Canada, an organization which advocates for these policies: https://www.commonwealth.ca/ (External link)
🔰Projected benefits of this tax shift in the EU, including increased employment and reduced carbon emissions - https://ex-tax.com/taxshift/ (External link)
🔰"How Low Taxes Lead To High Home Prices In Vancouver, BC: And how taxing land value can cool speculation and unlock affordability" - https://www.sightline.org/2022/05/09/how-low-taxes-lead-to-high-home-prices-in-vancouver-bc/ (External link)
🔰Other Green and environmentalist organizations' existing endorsements of similar ideas - https://commonground-usa.net/14320-2/ (External link)
🔰"Post-Corona balanced budget fiscal stimulus: The case for shifting taxes onto land" - https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/post-corona-balanced-budget-fiscal-stimulus-case-shift
Henry George Foundation of Canada https://earthsharing.ca/page/about-us
Does this proposal affect any particular group and what efforts have been made to consult with the group or groups?
N/A
Jurisdiction: Is this proposal under federal jurisdiction?
Yes
Please indicate the language the proposal is being submitted in.
English
This proposal is being evaluated
Posted on the Continuous Motion Development Vote tab for member review prior to the all-member vote.
Amendments (1)
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Created at
04/07/2024 -
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Conversation with James Mihaychuk
I think this policy needs to be workshopped to refine the proposed equivalence of rights of all people to a different formulation that recognizes Indigenous peopless (First Nations, Inuit, and Metis) in order to recognize treaty rights, the Calls to Action of the TRC, and the UNDRIP.
It appears you want o tax rental income more rather than dividend income which is what we are doing now.Lower taxes on
rental income may help the housing situation. companies searching for higher dividends want to cut jobs,pay low wages ect.does not sound real good to me.
I couldn't fit this extra layer of complexity into this policy given the character limits. (Frank made the initial proposal; with help from him and Anna Keenan, I revised it into the current version.)
I think we need an additional policy - perhaps in next year's process? - to achieve this; the current policy process doesn't let us include this much detail in one policy.
For now, though, to answer your concern: taxes on occupation, use, and degradation of the public's natural resources are a highly elegant mechanism for restoring Indigenous sovereignty! The short version is that Indigenous governments could and should directly receive the natural tax revenue collected within their lands (minus what is needed to provide reserve residents with provincial and federal government services). That way, Indigenous governments wouldn't just have political sovereignty - they would also regain _economic_ sovereignty through ownership of the economic output of their lands.
Obviously, this needs to be paired with restoration of treaty lands to Indigenous control (and all the numerous other steps required to create true equality for Indigenous people!).
I would love to help write a companion policy all about this... but it's really not my place to prescribe it unilaterally. The intricacies of Indigenous law aren't my area of expertise, so, while I can describe the overall idea, I don't have the expertise required to engineer the fine details, never mind the authority to declare as a non-Indigenous person what Indigenous tax policy should look like.
I'm more than happy to explain and promote this aspect of the idea, but it should only be adopted through the support of Indigenous people who have designed the implementation of it themselves. Accordingly, I'd be happy to work with experts in Indigenous affairs to write this new proposal for next year's process.
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