Up to $7,600/Year in dividends per Canadian, paid from our commons.
We all have an equal stake in our country, but we aren’t getting an equal share in its riches. By collecting value arising from our shared natural and co-created wealth, we could rebate every Canadian adult up to $7,600/year in dividends — restoring each person’s share of our common wealth and improving economic opportunity for all.
Our Common Wealth Dividends plan
There’s over $241B/year of value arising from Canada’s shared natural and co-created wealth that could be returned to Canadians. That’s enough to 1) to rebate every adult up to $7,600/year in dividends, or 2) eliminate all federal personal income taxes and pay a $2,000/year dividend, or 3) eliminate all federal and provincial taxes on personal income under $253,000/year.
Option 1
Dividend Only
$7,600/year
per adult
No changes to income tax
Option 2
Dividend & lower income tax
$2,000/year
per adult
Eliminate all federal personal income tax
Option 3
Lower income tax only
No dividend
Eliminate federal & provincial personal income tax under $253,000/year. 97% of Canadians pay no income tax.
Common Wealth Dividends: a better way to share earth’s resources
Key Takeaways
Canadians are being squeezed by stagnant wages and rising costs, while economic mobility erodes and wealth inequality grows. For many, jobs are no longer enough to guarantee economic security.
Programs like basic income help alleviate poverty, but aren’t designed to address the underlying drivers of inequality and how we share in the earth and its resources.
The answer is to build common wealth that pays us dividends from our shared natural and socially-created resources — a UBI in the form of social dividends.
Common Wealth Dividends are how we address inequality, improve economic opportunity, and allow each of us to be a beneficiary of Canada’s vast collective wealth.
Jobs aren’t working anymore.
Something is broken in our economy. Median wages have barely caught up with inflation since the 1970s. Working Canadians’ share of income has dropped precipitously since then, equivalent to over $2 trillion less in wages had the share stayed constant, even as technology continues to increase our productivity and grow our economy,
Half of Canadians live paycheque-to-paycheque, $200 or less away from insolvency. Intergenerational economic mobility has dropped significantly as Canadians are now more likely to stay within the income and wealth class of their parents. Cost of living pressures and the rate of inflation remain the #1 issue for Canadians by a large margin.
Meanwhile, over 40% of job tasks today are at high risk of automation using existing technology, including some of the most common occupations in Canada today. Technology has become cheaper than workers, with human-replacing robots costing as low as $3/hour to operate. Research shows that many displaced workers don’t see their incomes recover, even years later.
Many middle-income jobs are disappearing and being replaced with some high-paying, and more low-pay jobs, leading to increasing job and income polarization.
Canada’s Middle class jobs are disappearing
High-incomes (grey) vs. everyone else (blue)
Wages just can’t catch up
One-third of Canadians are ‘house poor’ while 30% of households are unable to meet all of their financial commitments. 1 in 8 are in core housing need, spending more than 30% of their pre-tax income on shelter. The following graphs make it abundantly clear why: the value of homes is soaring, driving up the #1 cost of living for Canadians, rents and mortgages.
Real estate (blue) is the fastest growing sector of Canada’s wealth
Home prices have soared vs. incomes (red)
As it turns out, those with wealth tend to invest it in real estate to benefit from rising land values, the part of homes that appreciates. This speculative investor demand has led to land values far outpacing wages, fuelling greater wealth inequality and making life more expensive for everyone.
(In our Housing article, we explain why this is and what we can do about it.)
UBI as Common Wealth Dividends
Social assistance programs like Guaranteed Basic Income help alleviate poverty and its worst symptoms in our current system, but aren’t designed to address the underlying systemic drivers of wealth inequality and polarization. What we need is a way to share in the value of the earth and its resources through dividends, as originally envisioned by long-standing members of the basic income movement. (Read more: Introduction to Common Wealth for Basic Income supporters.)
In his final years, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for a guaranteed minimum income, while also believing that true compassion is more than giving money to “discouraged beggars” as a form of charity. He argued that we must come "to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring", telling his followers to raise "questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth."
Echoing the same feeling and pointing to the necessary restructuring, the co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network, economist and professor Guy Standing says "regrettably, much public debate on basic income has focused on it as an alternative form of social protection to existing policies". Professor Standing instead links the authentic justification for a basic income to a "social dividend paid from the collective wealth of society created and maintained by our ancestors and as a shared return on the commons and natural resources that belong to all... rather than as a response to poverty per se".
Asking questions about our economic system led many economists and philosophers in the basic income movement to a fairly consistent view that what we need is not re-distribution of wealth, but rather pre-distribution of resources, our common wealth, that we can claim an equal natural right and moral stake in — building common wealth that can pay us dividends.
Political philosopher, economist and professor Karl Widerquist proposes that governments should build up a permanent endowment of publicly held assets, using part of it for public spending and the rest “for a dividend in the form of an unconditional basic income for all people - in recognition of their shared ownership of their common resources and the sacrifice they make living in a world where others own the environment they live in”.
The idea for a social dividend paid for by our commons can be traced back to Thomas Paine, one of the founding figures of America, who wrote that:
“the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race”.
Common Wealth Dividends already exist — and they work
Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend: Oil as common wealth
In Alaska, every resident receives an annual cash dividend representing their share of the revenue derived from their land, through the oil reserves beneath. This wildly popular program is why Alaska has among the lowest inequality and poverty rates in the US.
This is not a tax nor is it redistribution of wealth. It is predistribution of the value from common resources that every Alaskan has an equal moral claim to. The following commentary on the work of Governor Jay Hammond, who set up the program in the 1970s, reveals his true intentions:
For Hammond and the small group of Alaska legislators, aides and ordinary citizens who worked with him when he was governor to achieve a resource-based investment dividend, the shared core idea was neither charity, nor leveling, nor an attempt to build an income floor. Their shared commitment was to the notion of collective ownership and the fundamental fairness of sharing the returns in equal proportion to their equal ownership...
This dividend reflects a shared understanding among Alaskans that the value of their environment is the common property of the people, and that its value should be stewarded for the benefit of everyone equally. The immense popularity of this program now means that politicians compete to demonstrate to the public their efforts to defend it.
Finally, Alaska’s example has shown the world that paying dividends from our common wealth will not do harm to our market system, entrepreneurial incentives, capital formation or job creation. It can in fact enhance these things, as everyone has a floor to build on and pursue their fuller potential. Research shows that this dividend had no significant effect on full-time employment, while part-time work increased by 17%. Every year before the cheques roll out, businesses offer ‘dividend discounts’ to attract this extra spending power from consumers.
Canada’s Carbon Rebate: Air as common wealth
Canada has an existing common wealth dividend paid for by charging a levy on carbon pollution. The carbon rebate “Climate Action Incentive” reflects a shared understanding that air is part of our common wealth which no one should own it, and those who wish to pollute must pay.
Carbon pricing systems are generally considered one of the most economically efficient ways to raise public revenue, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and drive innovation in sustainability. There are a variety of ways that governments could reinvest carbon pricing revenues, but research shows that rebating it directly back to people leaves more families better off.
Indeed, Canada’s carbon rebate returns nearly 100% of revenues back to Canadians and leaves a majority of households financially better off. Rather than making life more expensive, the rebate delivers a net financial benefit to most Canadians, especially to low-income households who need it most.
Paying dividends from carbon pollution is not only effective, it’s politically popular: a majority of Canadians support carbon pricing if the money is returned directly to them. Polls show that simply framing the carbon price as a ‘dividend’ or ‘levy’ increases public support. Just like in Alaska, the dividend imbues the principle that air is common property to be stewarded for the benefit of everyone.
(Read more in our Environmental Sustainability page.)
Building common wealth for shared prosperity
Building common wealth that pays us a dividend, funded from sources that we can morally justify an equal claim to, is a path to shared prosperity in an era of increasing extreme wealth inequality and polarization of jobs, lives, and quality of life. Common wealth can be the people's defense against the dangers of extreme private wealth overwhelming our political power and opportunities to get ahead in life.
If we received dividends from our commons, we’d have a form of capitalism built on a sense of 'the commons', as advances in technology and entrepreneurial activities grow the value of our common wealth for the benefit of all, while maintaining entrepreneurial incentives and market dynamism.
In the context of a market system, if we owned what we were due, we wouldn't have the levels of poverty we see today. Progress would accompany an increase in the value of our common wealth just at it does for the stock portfolios of the wealthiest, increasing the dividends we all receive and ensuring poverty doesn't grow as progress continues. It would have a sizable impact on the disposable incomes of working people, putting more money in Canadians’ pockets to spend on living well and investing in a better future for our children.
As author and entrepreneur Peter Barnes writes, if we recognized the earth and its resources as our common property, “we could transform markets, societies and our planet simultaneously. Instead of destroying nature, markets would protect it; instead of widening inequality, markets would reduce it.”
It’s time to build common wealth that can pay us dividends. This is how we build a human-centered economy for the coming centuries, where advancing technological productivity and the value of earth’s resources benefit all of us.
Natural Common Wealth and Economic Rent in Canada
In this paper, we estimate the total economic rents (or unearned profits) from Canada’s land and natural resources that could be collected as new revenue, without inhibiting productive investment. At $241 billion/year, it could be enough to raise the 0% personal income tax bracket to $250,000/year or generate a dividend of $7,600/year per adult.
