And very sparsely populated. Take a look at this population density map of Scotland - note that nearly everyone lives in the relatively flat regions around Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and the mountainous, hilly and craggy regions are simply not populated to any degree.
You can thank the Highland Clearances (Scottish class wars) for that.
Who cares? He wants to buy land and can’t. So what if he’s that kind of farmer or a widget manufacturer or a beekeeper?
… which were caused by private ownership of land - the very thing you appear to want for Canada. 
Hell, if I owned a lot of land, I’d not want whole villages of Scots living on it.
But more seriously - even before the clearances, the population density of the Scottish highlands was comparatively low - which explains why the (protestant) lowlands managed to dominate the (Catholic, Gaelic) highlands: higher population density = more political, economic and military power.
I have a simple question for both of you.
How can Crown land simultaneously be worthless and still have worth to the government and the companies who license it for their use?
If it’s worthless, why is the government bothering to absorb the cost & effort of administering all that land? Why aren’t they giving it away - begging people to take off their hands?
Actually, if you read the thread, lots of suggestions are given as to how he can - but that’s besides the point.
The point being, living “off the grid” and growing organic carrots to feed yourself may have lots to recommend for it philosophically - but one thing it isn’t, is economically competitive.
Quite naturally, people wanting to do that will lack the economic clout of (say) people working professional jobs wanting cottages, people working 9-5 jobs wanting houses, or people working in resource - extraction industries wanting materials: in free market completion, the organic carrot-growers are gonna get pushed to the margins, exactly as one would expect - priced out of ‘good’ lands.
It doesn’t take some sort of conspiracy to do that: land on which one can grow carrots to feed oneself is also land on which one can use for other, more lucrative uses.
What is the cost of administering a mountain? “Yup, still a mountain.” Similarly, the muskeg of northern Ontario - what is it you are imagining that the government is doing there that is costing them anything?
Here is another test.
Australia has a few high population centers bordered by more useless land than you can shake a stick at. Like Canada.
Is there a problem with finding affordable land/dwelling in the Land Down under like it sounds to be in Canada?
If not…why the difference?
Right, that’s the other thing that gets me - OK, you want more metro center in Canada. Great, great, everyone is behind that idea in general. Sticking one family on 100 acres of land, however, is not going to get you there.
I don’t think you really understand what “crown land” is.
Most of it just sits there, as it has for thousands of years. There is no “effort and expense” involved: other than keeping an eye out for wildfires.
Puh-lease. You know what I’m getting at. If companies are willing to license the land from the government, that’s evidence that the land is not worthless.
Around Australia’s large metro areas, housing is expensive, just as in around metro centers in Canada – and the United States, and every other country in the world for that matter. Again, if all you’re looking for is land to build a house on, you can in fact have that very cheaply - it’s just not going to be near a major population center. Many examples of raw land, which met your price criteria, have been posted for you in this thread.
But for some reason, people are not clamoring to move out to those areas, in the same way that Stockton is more affordable than San Francisco, Utica is more affordable than New York City and Rockford is more affordable than Chicago. Perhaps is more than just the raw price of land that people value.
They’re willing to license select amounts of it at a time, because they have a specific use for that exact site. No one wants all of it. And you asked why the government is enduring a cost. There is no cost. The land simply exists.
What’s your basis for making blanket statements like that? By that logic, they should just put the land on the market and get whatever they can.
That statement from your favorite permaculture farmer has more of the ring of truth- “Given how often they sell crown land for less than $15M to non-corporations, you might as well engineer a flying pig.”
And that my friends is why Canadian bacon cost a fortune…
Do the words “supply and demand” have any meaning to you? Again, I’d ask you what specific expense you think is involved in administering Crown lands.
Well stated, blue infinity.
Part of the challenge with your thread here is you’ve made three or four different charges against your government’s policy. As a Yanqui I have zero knowledge of the operational details of Crown land sales nor of the politics surrounding them. All I can do is address points of logic.
If indeed we see plausible farmland being readily sold by the government to large corporate factory farms when they wouldn’t be willing to sell the same land to smallholders you’d have a real point. If what you have found is instead just a couple of disgruntled would-be buyers who were outbid or who had no assets or credit with which to pay for the land they wanted, well … you’ve got a different situation.
I don’t know which you’ve found. Do you?
In general raw land is sold in large tracts. It really wrecks the future value of a 10mile by 10mile tract of land to have previously sold off 5 pinprick acres (or fractions of an acre) within it to 5 smallholders.
*If *the government is only willing to sell large tracts that has the effect of locking out the smallholder as a first generation buyer. The smallholders’ opportunities will only come after the original purchaser subdivides. And yes, there’s going to be a mark-up for that. In fact it may take 2 or 3 generations of sales, subdivision, and re-selling sub-plots to get down to the plot size for a family farm or a rural idyll retreat retirement home.
At least in the USA, family farms are a dying breed. Substantially nobody wants to buy a family farm to operate it as such. Conglomerate agribusinesses are buying them up to operate as just another plot. As are local county-level land barons. The supply of existing farms for sale far exceeds the demand for fresh land to convert to farms.
The romantic idea of giving a citizen 40 acres & a mule then wishing him luck ended about 135 years ago. There is neither demand nor supply for this idea.
Well, to me it’s immaterial if someone wants land for a big farm, little farm, a single-family house or a bottlecap factory. The fact remains that everyone flocks to a few small locations that have good infrastructure and have very inflated property values… meanwhile 90% of the country is crown land that gets leased out to big companies.
It’s as if everyone in the United States piled into Pennsylvania, leaving the rest undeveloped, based on the idea that the rest of the country was worthless.
I’m happy to be proven wrong but the whole problem is that there is no critical analysis of crown land holdings that I’ve ever seen so all I have to go by is peoples’ experiences. Just throwing around the cliche that the land is worthless isn’t really doing it for me.
But I mean, one only take a visit out to these locations to see why no one’s building there. People, in general, do not build on steep mountainsides or swamps or tundra for the hell of it out of some pioneer spirit. It is really, really, really expensive to do so, especially when nothing exists. And has been pointed out, the land is for sale if someone shows an interest - but why would they, unless they know something about its resource value? You say that 90% of Canada is Crown Land that is leased out to corporations - but only the first part of that is correct - the vast majority of Crown Land is not leased out because no one can figure out what to do with it.
Not everything in Canada is a swamp, tundra or mountain. Like I said, the government certainly finds the land valuable enough to hold onto… and it’s impossible to prove that wrong unless the land is actually put on the market.
Also, by that logic I suppose Minneapolis and Denver shouldn’t exist? You bet your ass that if the U.S. had colonized the west coast, you’d see settlements all the way from Seattle to Alaska.