Why Selling Off the Commons Threatens Our Collective Future
In a world where everything has a barcode and a price tag, we're witnessing the final, grotesque auction of what once belonged to all of us. The commons—that quaint concept apparently too socialist for our hyper-capitalist dystopia—is being carved up and sold to the highest bidder with the enthusiasm of a liquidation sale at a failed Hudson's Bay Company (ruined by USA vulture capitalists). Welcome to the grand fire sale of civilization, where true common sense has been replaced by the dizzying logic of quarterly profits and shareholder value, with a side of maple syrup to help the medicine go down.
The Commons: What We're Losing While Politely Not Mentioning It
What are "the commons"? They're everything you rely on but never had to build yourself. The air you breathe across our vast boreal forests (increasingly packaged with microplastics, free of charge). The water that flows through our Great Lakes (now increasingly eyed by American bottling companies). The genetic heritage of seeds that fed humanity for 10,000 years (now patented and controlled by agricultural conglomerates with more lawyers than farmers in Saskatchewan). The CBC—once conceived as a public broadcaster serving all Canadians—now fights for survival against private interests who'd rather sell us American reality shows than reflect our own stories.
The commons are the inheritance of generations, our collective wealth that makes civilization possible. But in our breathtaking shortsightedness, we're treating them like a trust fund to be blown on a weekend bender in Niagara Falls.
The Slow-Motion Heist of Everything, With Apologies
The selling off of the commons isn't happening in a dramatic cinematic heist with explosions and getaway cars. It's happening in mundane boardrooms and legislative chambers, through arcane legal maneuvers and dense regulatory changes that put the average citizen to sleep faster than a parliamentary budget debate on CPAC.
Consider water—the literal essence of life. While Canadians smugly imagine our water resources are protected, corporations quietly bottle it for pennies and sell it back to us for dollars. Indigenous communities across the country still face boil-water advisories while multinational companies extract our resources with impunity. Sorry, but in what universe does this arrangement qualify as "common sense"?
Or take our healthcare system—once the pride of our national identity, but now the canary in the coal mine. While Americans look north with envy, we've been allowing our public healthcare to be systematically underfunded, creating the artificial crisis necessary to justify private "solutions."
Across provinces, we're witnessing the creep of two-tier care, with private clinics offering faster service for those who can pay while the public system struggles with deliberately engineered shortages. We're not copying the American nightmare all at once—we're doing it incrementally, with typical Canadian politeness, apologizing for the inconvenience as we dismantle our greatest achievement.
The Thieves' Logic: Privatize Gains, Socialize Losses, Say Sorry
The perverse genius of this grand theft is how it operates: privatize profits while socializing risks and costs. When resource companies extract from our vast landscapes, they pocket the billions while leaving behind environmental devastation that taxpayers clean up, from the oil sands to abandoned mines. When auto manufacturers face collapse due to market forces, we bail them out with billions in public funds. At the same time, they continue paying executive bonuses that could fund small northern communities for years. When tech companies build empires harvesting our personal data, they fight tooth and nail against contributing to the CBC and Canadian culture.
This is what passes for "innovation" in late-stage capitalism—finding ever more creative ways to extract wealth from the public domain while contributing as little as possible back to it. The commons are treated like an all-you-can-eat sushi bar for corporations and a pay-per-piece for everyone else.
The Cost: What's Lost When Everything Has a Price (In Both Official Languages)
When we lose the commons, we lose more than resources—we lose our sense of shared destiny. The public library—that radical concept that knowledge should be freely available to all—is increasingly under attack. Public spaces where people of different classes might actually encounter each other are vanishing. Even our national parks, supposedly protected for all Canadians, face constant pressure from private development and resource extraction.
These losses can't be measured on balance sheets. When children grow up never experiencing untouched nature because every forest requires an entrance fee, something profound is lost. When scientific research conducted at our publicly funded universities is locked behind paywalls instead of shared freely, human progress slows down. When cultural heritage is commodified until its meaning is stripped away, we lose our connection to history, both the parts we celebrate and the parts, like our treatment of First Nations peoples, that we must confront honestly.
The most insidious cost is to democracy itself. As more life becomes privatized, the sphere where we make decisions as citizens rather than consumers shrinks. Voting matters less than purchasing power. This isn't just inequality—it's the replacement of citizens with customers, of democracy with plutocracy, all done with such politeness that we barely notice until it's too late.
True Common Sense: The Wisdom Tommy Douglas Tried to Teach Us
True common sense—the kind our ancestors understood instinctively—recognizes that some things work better when shared. Indigenous cultures across Turtle Island maintained sophisticated systems for managing shared resources sustainably for thousands of years. Early European settlers in Canada understood that survival in our harsh climate required collective effort and mutual aid. These weren't utopian dreams but practical systems based on the understanding that individual prosperity depends on collective well-being.
This isn't about naive socialism or rejecting markets entirely. It's about recognizing that markets are brilliant servants but terrible masters. Some things—like emergency services, healthcare, education, clean air and water—generate more value for society when treated as public goods rather than profit centers. Tommy Douglas didn't fight for universal healthcare because he was a bleeding heart; he did it because it made economic and moral sense to pool our resources to protect everyone.
Consider the healthcare system, which was once our greatest achievement. Its transformation into a hybrid public-private patchwork wasn't inevitable but a policy choice made incrementally over decades. The same principles could have been strengthened rather than eroded. The difference was in whether we applied true common sense or market fundamentalism dressed up in the language of "efficiency" and "choice."
Reclaiming the Commons: The Last Defence of Canadian Sanity
Here's the brutal truth: we're running out of commons to sell. The climate system that maintained stable conditions for 10,000 years of civilization is breaking down, with Canada warming at twice the global rate. Water tables are depleting, topsoil is vanishing, and biodiversity is collapsing. The social trust that makes democracy function evaporates faster than a puddle in July.
Reclaiming the commons isn't about nostalgia—it's survival. It means recognizing that the atmosphere is not a free dumping ground for carbon. It means treating water as a human right rather than a commodity, starting with ending all boil-water advisories in Indigenous communities. It means ensuring that lifesaving medicines developed with public funding remain accessible to the public through our universal pharmacare that somehow still doesn't exist. It means protecting public education as the foundation of democracy rather than a profit center.
This isn't radical—it's the bare minimum of sanity in a world gone mad with marketization. The true radicals are those who believe we can continue treating the foundations of life as just another asset class to be squeezed for profit while saying "sorry about that" as our social fabric unravels.
The Choice: Commons or Collapse
We stand at a crossroads. One path continues the privatization frenzy until nothing remains of our shared inheritance. The other recognizes that true wealth is not measured in private accumulation but in the health of what we share.
The choice should be obvious, yet we hesitate.
Decades of propaganda have convinced many that anything public is inherently inefficient and that the invisible hand of the market will magically solve the problems it created. Meanwhile, the remaining commons are being carved up and sold off with increasing desperation.
True common sense tells us this path leads to collective self-destruction. No amount of private wealth can protect anyone from collapsed ecosystems or shattered societies.
The billionaires building bunkers in New Zealand understand this on some level—they're preparing for the consequences of the very system that enriched them.
But there is still time to choose differently—to recognize that the wisdom of the commons isn't obsolete but essential, that protecting what belongs to all of us isn't just moral but practical, and that true common sense means not selling off the commons because without them, there is no future worth having, no matter how politely we discuss our demise.
The auction is still ongoing. The question is whether we'll come to our senses before the final gavel falls or just keep apologizing as we sell off the ground beneath our feet.
