What business domains, services, organizations should be nationalized to ensure Canadian sovereignty?
What business domains, services, organizations should be nationalized to ensure Canadian sovereignty?
Comments
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Rail.
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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.
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Food supply lines.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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How I read the question is what should be nationalised, not what else should be.
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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.
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Here's another: mineral extraction and lumber exploitation.
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Cloud data storage and services.
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Loblaws and subsidiaries
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How about subsidized grocery COOPs? Would that work?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've said this like a dozen times in the comments. A dictatorship can ALREADY take away your land if they wanted to. The Canadian government expropriates land from private citizens all the time.
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YES YES YES. Use LVT to replace one of the awful taxes Canadians gripe about (maybe GST, maybe income tax?)
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100% replace income taxes.
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lol people would go wild if that was even muttered on the news
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Interac, should be made the Canadian equivalent of PIX, managed by the central bank, competing with credit cards
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I see a lot of comments are proposing for the nationalization of whole industries, which is somewhat concerning. There needs to be some balance, not to fatten the checks of those billionaires, and not to make the government too powerful.
For example, instead of (re-)nationalizing CN, nationalize the tracks themselves. The government can lay down tracks for places that need to be reached, and companies can then run their trains on them. It’s no different from how roads are public really. Companies can then focus on serving section of the tracks for areas that they understand best. Of course, there will be cases where there’s a need to consider if the investment from the government is worth it, cause what if they laid the tracks but no one’s willing to take advantage of that? Well, they can let companies bid, and there’s no bidder, they can choose to not take on the project. Of course, there’s always the option for the government to have its own train company to serve certain areas.
For telcos, instead of nationalizing the entire vertical, nationalize cell towers and cable paths. Allow companies to build their own towers if they so desire, but the main draw is that different providers can rely on shared infrastructure, and none of this Robelus bullshit that we have right now. Cable paths is probably odd, but these sorts of technology get changed quite often. The government can still own some cables, allowing smaller players to take advantage of those, but it would level out the playing field by a lot.
For the Internet and whole businesses within it, having our own cloud infrastructure, or AWS alternative, would be best. People can then run whatever on those. There is, of course, a concern of the government not respecting people’s privacies, and so it needs to be run somewhat independent of the government, allowing the government to set directions but not what exactly to do; sort of Crown-corp-y if you will.
In all my examples, the idea is simply this: nationalize the stuff that serve as the basis for a particular service. Think roads instead of cars.
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I thin as soon as you let private companies into critical infrastructures, you run te risk of having abuses. Freight trains are critical for economic sovereingty. Even by having public rails but private train companies, you still run the risk of having a foreign company overcharging or simply stopping service during a trade, economic, or actual war. Same with transportation. It's such an essential service to have in a geographically large country like Canada, it shouldn't be left solely to private companies or risk geeting gouged.
And that's just for rail, trains, transport, etc.
For internet, make the infrastructure public and let companies use it to sell services. That's fine. But still offer a public alternative just in case.
As for cloud services, the government should definitely have its own cloud system, but it shouldn't be for public use. I would never store my personal files and information on a government cloud. That would definitely be a huge privacy risk.
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If you’re running an infrastructure that many need, you could just say no to abusers, just like a healthy business would do.
And I know the times we’re in, but it’s just so odd to assume that businesses that serve the country are all owned and controlled by foreign companies. Why can’t a local player be in that place?
Public alternatives are fine, but they’ve generally stagnated in terms of improving their services and offerings, because, and I absolutely hate that I agree with the capitalists here even though I’m looking at it differently, at some point in their lifetime, the stability that a government-funded company offers will attract people who seek that stability without understanding how to achieve long term stability (which is to constantly improvement, instead of preserving the status quo). Income for these companies eventually drop, and we end up having to keep them afloat with tax money. That’s not necessarily a bad thing cause not all public services need to be profitable, but it’s still desirable to have them fund most of their activities on their own.
For cloud, it’s why mentioned that the government should be as removed as possible from its operations. These sorts of services can easily contain a lot of sensitive information, and the government should be kept at a healthy gap away from that data. Government-funded, yes, but let there also be a more direct mechanism from more grassroots and local organizations as well.
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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.
Fuck dude, I live in a major metropolitan area and I still don't have access to Fiber.
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!
bring back nortel! oh wait....