THERE IS room for some skepticism over Toronto Stock Exchange Chairman Don Page's claim last week of a ''substantially increased commitment to stock investment'' in Canadian society.

A niggling objection is that the TSE's latest Canadian Shareowners study is based on survey data, with a margin of error of two percentage points each way. Four-fifths of the increase in the proportion of the adult population owning shares, from 12.5% in 1983 to 17.5% today, could therefore simply be statistical error.

More to the point, it is difficult to imagine stock market participation not jumping considerably in the midst of one of the longest and strongest bull runs this century. How much of the increase represents a structural shift in the pattern of ownership, and how much simply fairweather sailors, awaits the next downturn.

In any case, the more significant fact is that, in a nominally capitalist society, four adult Canadians in five own no capital, at least in publicly traded corporations. If we are to keep pace with other nations, the past three years' growth will have to extend beyond the 2%-3% the TSE foresees adding by 1989, to a much more radical broadening of capital ownership.

For in the twilight of the 20th century, a new vision of capitalism is emerging in Western society. It is a dream of a capitalism of the masses, of a nation of shareholders, each with a stake in the productive means of society.

We are witnessing the slow rise of a ''people's capitalism'' - every citizen a capitalist, every company a coalition of entrepreneurs, the economy a system of competing worker co-operatives.

Much of the intellectual impetus comes from Britain: from advocates such as economist James Meade; Financial Times Assistant Editor Samuel Brittan; former economics editor of the Times, Peter Jay; and Conservative theorists Ferdinand Mount, John Redwood and David Howell. There is even an agitprop group, the Wider Share Ownership Council.

The British, in turn, look to the U.S. for much of their inspiration: to its broader share ownership pattern, and to American apostles of popular capitalism such as Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler, whose 1958 book The Capitalist Manifesto laid the groundwork for the now-widespread Employee Stock Ownership Plans.

The core philosophy is a kind of Thatcherite socialism, combining the free- market liberalism of the British ''New Enlightenment'' with a radical commitment to broadening the distribution of wealth.

The product of this union is an expanded idea of individualism. Just as democracy puts power into the hands of the individual as voter, just as the market puts power into the hands of the individual as consumer, so broad-based personal ownership of capital gives power to the individual as producer.

Says John Redwood, former head of the Prime Minister's Policy Unit: ''Popular capitalism is a crusade to enfranchise the many in the economic life of the nation. It is to wealth ownership what the great Reform Acts were to political democracy.''

Mass individual ownership of capital fulfills the old Tory ideal of One Nation, bonded by a universal interest in the financial returns of capital, knit together in the common experience of ownership, rather than the socialist ideal of common ownership per se.

It also establishes a bulwark against concentration of capital itself. While much beating of breasts has occurred of late over this topic in Canada, including calls for some sort of ill-defined constraints on those at the top of the ownership pyramid, too little attention has been given to a ''bottom-up'' approach, diluting concentration by expanding ownership at the base.

Particular benefits accrue to worker ownership, beyond the greater stake in and control of a company granted those whose livelihoods are bound most intimately to its fortunes. Society as a whole also gains, since employees with the security of a second income are more likely to accept the wage flexibility needed for labor markets to reach full employment.

More fundamentally, worker capitalism recognizes that the division between labor and capital characteristic of the early stage of capitalism from which we are emerging is no more the ''natural'' manner of economic life than hunting and gathering.

''Worker control of the means of production'' is not the exclusive province of socialism, nor should it be tainted with the collectivist error of the rest of socialist mythology. Indeed, it offers a better means of protecting the ordinary worker's interests against the depredations of capital than the crude, destructive instrument of the monopoly labor union.

Rather than massing ranks of workers against ranks of capitalists, the conflict can be resolved at source by making workers into capitalists. The individual worker has nothing to gain in maintaining the dwindling baronies of union leaders; it is ownership of capital that counts. (This in part explains why some of the firmest opponents of worker control are to be found in the upper reaches of organized labor.)

The new ''people's capitalism'' clearly goes beyond simple laissez-faire, yet could hardly be called socialism. Most emphatically, it is a rejection of the corporatist, collectivist, mixed-economy model of capitalism, the false middle way of the last half-century, in favor of decentralized, individualist forms of ownership and control.

It could, moreover, be said simply to be the rising trend of a maturing capitalism. This is implicit in the evolving dispersal of physical capital, from the mainframe to the microcomputer, from the large heavy manufacturing plant to the small, high-tech workshop. Financial capital is headed the same way.

Capital ownership participation rates have risen over the years in most industrialized nations, including Canada. Nonetheless, we are in danger of lagging behind other industrialized countries in progressing to the next stage of capitalism: - Behind the U.S., where 26% of adults are shareholders; where 95% of companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange are part-owned by their work force; and where it is projected that by the end of the century, more workers will be shareholders than union members (they are halfway there now, with almost 11 million worker-capitalists in 8,000 ESOPs). - Behind Great Britain, where the number of shareholders has more than tripled to seven million, or 17% of the adult population, since 1983; where more than 1,000 firms run some form of ESOP; where stocks are now sold out of department store ''share shops;'' and where new Personal Equity Plans provide tax relief on share purchases of up to $4,800 a year.

Privatization has been the key. In its first seven years, the Thatcher government sold more than US$10 billion of Crown equity, and plans sales worth more than US$18.1 billion before the next election, adding an expected three million more new shareholders to the rolls. That would bring the shareowning proportion of the adult population to almost one in four. - Behind Japan, Germany, Sweden, France and Hong Kong, where the proportion of the adult population owning shares is 16%, 17%, 21%, 14%, and 35% respectively. The French government's privatization proposals are even more sweeping than those of the British, encompassing US$35 billion in asset sales in five years, the aim being to quintuple the number of shareowners.

The current federal government's one attempt to remedy the situation, the $500,000 capital gains tax exemption, despite the TSE's enthusiasm, has little sound economics to recommend it. Tentative measures introduced by their Liberal predecessors to encourage profit-sharing and employee ownership have not been taken further. The initiative, instead, has come from the provinces.

Quebec's was the first and remains the most ambitious, despite some scaling back of late. Since its launch in 1979, the Quebec Stock Savings Plan has enrolled almost 250,000 investors, lured by its 50%-100% tax deductions on share purchases.

Alberta has followed suit with a tax credit plan, and Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia have similar programs in the works. A British Columbia program would lend investors the money, interest-free, to buy new issues. And Ontario will soon be the first province to introduce legislation encouraging worker ownership, offering a 15% tax credit for new share purchases (to a maximum of $2000) by employees of small and medium-sized firms.

The problem is that this is evolving into yet another form of interprovincial trade barrier, as each province's plan gives tax preference only to purchases of shares of locally based companies. Even at that, they go only part of the way to removing the obstacles to mass capital ownership.

What is needed is a national approach. It is time the federal government took a leading role in developing popular capitalism in Canada. Two main instruments are available to it: - Tax reform. Rather than piling on ever more elaborate income tax deductions for particular favored types of saving and investment, why not simply exempt - uniformly, 100% - all income not consumed? In other words, move to a consumption tax (The Post, Nov. 1).

This would involve no artificial incentive to saving - it would simply remove the present disincentive involved in the ''double taxation of savings'' (first on ordinary income, then on the returns to investment). In simplest form, it would amount to removing limits on registered retirement savings plans, incorporating or alongside a nationwide stock savings plan.

A case could be made, however, for departing from fiscal neutrality to provide tax incentives for employee ownership, given the broader social benefits (''externalities,'' in econospeak) and hostility from organized labor mentioned above. - Privatization. To date, Canadian privatizations chiefly have involved private sales. Efforts should be accelerated to transfer the larger Crown corporations from the state to the people by public offering - Air Canada, Canadian National, PetroCanada and Canada Post.

Pricing such issues is the thorniest problem. On the one hand, shares should be priced low enough to attract small investors. On the other, privatization, however populist its intent, still involves transferring assets at least theoretically held by all to a minority - and a minority of more than average wealth, at that.

A more radical approach, then, would contemplate simply giving away the shares free to every citizen in the country - that is, to aim for universal capital ownership. The Social Democratic Party in Britain, with some Conservative support, has argued that one third of the shares in British Gas should be so distributed.

Here, Canada may be said to provide the model. According to the TSE study, 530,000 people who hold no other stock own equity in British Columbia Resources Investment Corp., whose shares were distributed free to the population in 1979; these included, the incidence of share ownership in B.C. is 50% higher than the national average. Some members of the Tory caucus would also like to apply the idea to PetroCanada. This would avoid the problem of selling shares in the energy giant at a time of depressed oil prices.

Indeed, an added benefit of distributing shares gratis is precisely that it scratches revenue-maximization from the list of privatization concerns. Governments will hence be less tempted into such blunders as selling public corporations with their monopolies intact - the great failing of the British privatizations - to sweeten their appeal to investors.

But do those receiving freely distributed shares become shareholders in the proper meaning of the term? Argues British Transport Secretary John Moore, ''The true sensation of ownership comes not with the free handout of some unsought benefit. It comes rather when people have assessed the goods on offer, weighed it up, and finally decided that it was worth putting their money into.''

However this is resolved, privatization offers the best available means of priming the pump for popular capitalism in Canada. This does not amount, as critics charge, to ''selling the family silver.'' As British Energy Secretary Peter Walker has said, ''It is transferring the silver from the politicians and the civil servants to the family.''