What if people could take a buyout and form their own country? For example, each Canadian could be given 1/40,000,000 of all the resources in Canada (including the land) and then allowed to setup their own borders for their own country? Now obviously if 100 people got together they could form their own country if they agreed.
I really think buying people out of the country seems fair. You often hear people say like "if you don't agree with the government then find a different country". I think we should let people do exactly that but fairly by letting people have a fair share of the resources in the country they are abandoning so they have land and resources to truly find a new country by starting their own.
The "left" might even get behind this sort of idea because obviously this is a great way to start a communist utopia. The only reason we don't have one now is because of the evil capitalists stealing all the resources but if people are give. 1/40,000,000 of all the resources when they decide to leave Canada then this no longer becomes an issue.
I’m not sure that your 1/40,000,000 number is the perfect ratio, but that’s just a scaling problem, and probably not something you intended as perfect anyway. The bigger practical issue is that not every share of land is equally valuable. For example, if a group could get a sizable patch of land that included fresh water, some forest, and space to grow food, that would be pretty nice. If that same group could get three times the space, but it had to be in the middle of the Australian outback, the least hospitable parts of the Canadian north, or Death Valley, USA, that’s much less desirable.
Another issue is liquidation of assets. How does one evaluate [a given fraction] of all a country’s wealth and resources? Once such a thing is evaluated, are we literally handing that over—some petrol, some iron, some food, some guns, some munitions, and so on, or are we giving an amount of cash assumed to have corresponding value? Liquidating assets on command can be difficult, but supply with the raw materials seems even sillier. This problem only gets worse when we go back to the question of which land is actually given up. Is it a portion of the land the people live on now? If a few square blocks in Brooklyn decide to federalize, do they make an enclave out of those square blocks, surrounded by the rest of the city? What happens to the public utilities that run under them? What about if a high-rise building federalizes? That many people would have claim to a larger footprint of land than the building sits on, so do we kick other people out of their homes to give them their land? Do we sever mortgages and contracts?
Are the resulting micro-states responsible for their own defense? If they start gobbling each other up, maybe we don’t care, but what if a subversive force like the cartels takes them as bases for drug trafficking, or a serious geopolitical rival like China starts occupying one of the larger ones, should one form on, say, the Pacific coast line?
It’s an interesting idea in principle, but massively impractical now. Maybe it would have worked before the world was as settled and explored as it is, in the days when exile was a practical punishment. Now, I don’t see a way to make it happen.