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> some people with houses near the coast are retired, they just want to live a peaceful life near the sea, they don't want to relocate,

What about social services? We have public health care in Canada and seniors are the most expensive. Plus, with no industry where are they going to get medication and food? And it's not all seniors, the person in the article isn't leaving because he scared he won't be able to find work elsewhere.

So they also have a bunch of non-seniors they have to support as well. And no industry for them to participate in, whereas elsewhere in the province they could contribute to the economy and pay taxes. Instead of just being an economic drain on the state.

There is a reason the province decided it would be more economical to offer them money to leave than paying for the services for them to stay.

Believe it or not, not everyone wants to participate in society once they've done their fair share (retired)

I didn't say anything about seniors needing to 'participate in society' after retirement. I specifically said "non-seniors" have no industry to participate in there... which makes economic sense to relocate them.

My point related to seniors was related to the increased medical care costs required for remote poorly serviced communities. They don't even have a fire department...

I'd seriously be fine with that. I would not mind giving up all social services, especially not if I got a cashback. That said, I would expect this to come with 'no taxation in the future' as well. That said, I am not everybody.

Would you be seriously fine with the nearest grocery store being an hour away (over deteriorating roads) and it possibly being 3x as expensive? Plus, what are you going to do about garbage? People forget that is also a social service.

If they are fine with the nearest store being an hour away, who are you to judge.

A tiny group can just burn garbage, or whoever is serving that town that's an hour away can have their truck spend 2 hours every other week to come pick it up.

Garbage collection is not a social service, it is a commercial paid service in most of the world. In Europe I don't pay taxes for garbage collection, I pay the garbage company for the quantity they pick up.

In Canada, it's generally the case that your taxes go to pick up the garbage. They might hire a company to do it, but it's usually the municipal government that pays. I'm living in a co-op and we get a tax break since we contract ours separately. Even if it's a commercial paid service, how many companies are going to do that in a dying community?

Not in highrises. Residents for that on their own. Though it's a municipal issue, so it may depend on where you live.

True, but in my co-op (one 6 story building and one 3 story building) we get a tax break because we handle our own garbage. It's far less than our garbage bill, but it helps. I know because a) I used to be the co-op treasurer and b) we actually list it as a line item on our budget so everybody in the co-op can see it if they look.

In the most rural parts of the US, people don't have garbage collection at all. They compost some of it, burn some, and either drive the rest to the dump themselves or bury it on their own land.

Not that those things would necessarily apply or happen just because the collective solution would go away, but yes - I would actually be fine with that.

>> I would not mind giving up all social services, especially not if I got a cashback.

It's not your decision. The collective system collapses if everyone is given the choose to opt out. Canada isn't going to let people suffer and die along in the woods without help just because they signed an opt-out form. Nor will the country allow seniors, who control most all privately-held wealth these days, to stop paying taxes because they want to live off the grid. Everyone is connected and everyone is expected to participate because when it hits the fan, everyone rushes in to help regardless.

I've had this discussion on countless climbing/skiing adventures. A person's choice to walk into the wilderness does not mean the government can abandon them to their fate once things go wrong, no matter what they say about not wanting help.

Believe it or not there's no legal basis in the west where the government owes help to individual citizens. Protecting the good common does not in itself transfer 1-to-1 to helping Joe Blow down the street. It just happens that for the common good Joe Blow gets help. It's why cops can let a person die and still get off the hook if helping might endanger more than themselves because if their actions expand the risk to others to help a single person or a small group of people then they can be held liable for negligence. So, there's no theory in law that allows you to make the assertions you're trying to make. I strongly suggest you read on the law because I've seen people try to argue the same sort of stuff you do and find out later in court they got smacked down hard by the judge for the same reasons I've mentioned.

>What about social services?

This a pretty strong argument against social services. These people who have paid their share into society are now being to forced to move because it's convenient for the government.

Canada isn't the typical country when it comes to social services. While much of the population is concentrated in cities the rest of the country is vast, Mongolia or Siberia vast. Some areas, while not vast, are extremely rugged. The west coast of BC is thousands of islands and tiny inlets.

For perspective, draw a line between Vancouver BC and Alaska. 800km and you cross 2 connected roads, one of which being the highway to Whistler. Note all the unconnected little towns along the way. Those are the areas at issue.

https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8144629,-123.3765517,7z

Regardless of funding, there are practical limitations. Nobody could ever deliver something like 10-minute ambulance services to every resident. There probably aren't enough ambulances on the planet to station one within ten minutes of every Canadian. And a good number of those would have to be airborne. Roads are not the norm for much of the north.

Why not give them the option to pay a private company for those services?

Well in the end there is nothing. I watched Mangakino in New Zealand, a town built to service a dam nearby until those jobs were either finished or given to a computer, slowly deteriorate from a being regular town in the 1980s to something more dysfunctional in the late 90s, ending with the entire town being sold in a shady business deal. First the bank shut down, then the hospital, then the gas station...

There was a lot of petty crime committed by bored young people. My grandmother was punched in the face by someone prowling around her work at 6am in the morning. A cop was murdered, etc.

Apparently the town is doing better now as a tourist location for rich people; it has a beautiful lake that is heavily polluted by an upstream paper mill and dairy farming, but it was sad watching it slowly decay a little bit every day.

It's not even "the Canadian government". This was purely a Provincial scheme to lower costs.

Isn't a province... government? Might not be the State/Federal government, but yet surely it's government one way or another?

> Isn't a province... government? Might not be the State/Federal government, but yet surely it's government one way or another?

To me, saying "The Canadian government is doing X", is a statement about the activities of the Federal government. The use of the definite article implies singularity. A provincial government is not the Canadian government -- it's one of many in a federal system.

It might in some narrow sense be technically accurate to rewrite the headline "Texas Urges Court To Ban Enforcement Of All Federal Pro-Transgender Restroom Policies In Workplaces" to read "the US Government Urges Court To Ban Enforcement Of All Federal Pro-Transgender Restroom Policies In Workplaces", but it's misleading to the reader and drops a lot of important context. It leads to an impression of a much broader situation than actually exists.

Texas is a bad example. The US is a federation of what are essentially 50 different countries, or at least different sovereign governments. Texas is not part of the US federal government, not even a subset. It's its own government with its own constitution and areas of absolute authority (See 'states rights'). Canada is under a single sovereign, with the provincial governments being smaller pieces without absolute authorities. So to describe a provincial government as "the government of Canada" is far more accurate than calling Texas part of the US government.

There's not really much difference between the idea of states and provinces. Just like US states, they have laws and elected officials to themselves. It's the same in many other countries as well. It's pure American exceptionalism to think their "states" are somehow unique in this.

Does any other country have separate courthouses for the local and federal governments? Courthouses that hear virtually identical cases, but apply different rules of evidence and procedure depending upon in which states the litigants reside? Courthouses that literally cannot be allowed touch each other? There are four or five standard courses at US law schools virtually dedicated to state/fed splits. The American system of divided sovereigns is exceptional. It's weird.

Yes. Provincial courts are a thing in Canada in addition to Federal courts. I'm not sure about the "not touching" rule, but they are separate, because many offenses at the provincial level (i.e. not having a sign in French for your business in Quebec) aren't offenses at the Federal level.

Hell, the entire Quebec legal system is distinct from anywhere else in Canada, owing to its roots in France's legal traditions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_law

Only civil law.

This is just goal post shifting. That the US and Canada draw different lines between federal and state/provincial matters does not magically make the Provincial government of Newfoundland some adjunct arm of the government of Canada. Yes, in Canada, criminal law is a purely federal matter. Things that aren't a federal matter, like civil law, or like the bloody relocation program this story was about, vary wildly between provinces.

This whole insane dispute was whether you could refer to the actions of one Province as being a program run by "The government of Canada" without hopelessly misleading any sane person into believing it was a federal program. You simply cannot. It's a massive misunderstanding of Canada's governments to think otherwise. On Provincial matters, the provinces are wholly independent and asinine pedantry about minuteau of how constitutional devolution of powers to states or provinces works doesn't change that.

> Does any other country have separate courthouses for the local and federal governments?

The very country we're discussing here, Canada, does.

Federalism is not a uniquely American institution. Canada is a federal state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_federalism

No. All canadian courts are under the SCC. We have a single sovereign. So-called "provincial" courts are directly answerable to the SCC. They are not the highest courts in their provinces on any matters. The US system of state/fed courts is totally different. Take it from someone who actually practices in both.

Enumerating the rights of states in the US is hard. The things that are clearly states rights is unclear. People assert various things as being states rights, but I think they are incorrect that this is an answerable question. There is usually an assertion that something is in that category, but others will not agree. Is the right to marry with restrictions a state right or a federal right or both?

Its actually not hard, as there aren't any.

States (like all governments) don't have rights, they have powers. And those powers are usually detailed in the state constitution.

The federal Constitution limits the powers of states, assigns certain roles to the states, and reserves certain powers to them (or them and the people together), but generally the powers of the state are defined per state by the state's own foundational governing documents, just as the powers of the federal government are in its Constitution.

State constitutions regulate the relationship between the state and its people. So they do not have rights per se in that relationship. But the term "state's rights" refers to the relationship between the states and the federal government. In that case states really do have certain rights against the fed much as individual persons have rights under the US constitution. This is most clear in case where the state sues various wings of the fed, asserting their rights under the US constitution. One of the largest cases in recent years would be Shelby County[1] v. Holder that struck down much of the voting rights act. At the most basic level, states have the right to bring cases in federal courts.

[1] Shelby County is a local government, a devision of the state of Alabama under the Alabama constitution. Holder is an attorney general, an employee of the federal government and, importantly, not an elected official. Suing the prez is a very different ballgame.

Alternatively, the rights of the people of a state to choose how they are governed (along certain dimensions) without regard to the federal government.

My point (which I know you weren't directly replying to), is that there are suits and supreme court decisions that change what those rights are from time to time. At a certain time all the southern states would have said they had a right to control who could get married (like blocking whites and blacks), but was overturned in that famous case (Loving v some state I think). Similarly, the const. allows fed control of interstate commerce, yet there were endless lawsuits about what this applies to until the supremes decided it.

Then states all thought they could control what marriage meant (again, see above :-)), until they were again overruled by the supremes. I know there are rules and precedents, but I find it murky and mostly a political football (half the country is for states rights to trump the things they like and against states rights for things they don't like).

> Texas is not part of the US federal government, not even a subset.

And the government of Newfoundland and Labrador is neither a part of, nor a subset of, the Canadian federal government. As recent as the 1949 it was an entirely separate country. It is a latecomer to the Canadian Confederation.

America is not unique in its federalism.

> Canada is under a single sovereign, with the provincial governments being smaller pieces without absolute authorities.

This is completely incorrect. In point of fact, Provinces have more power than the federal government (and, in practice, more power than states do in the US). Section 33 of the charter devolves power to override the federal constitution or acts of the federal parliament to provincial legislatures. This so-called not-withstanding clause effectively grounds British-style parliamentary supremacy at the provincial level.

> And the government of Newfoundland and Labrador is neither a part of, nor a subset of, the Canadian federal government.

Name one indictable offense unique to any province.

Name one indictable offense that has force in another part of Canada but not one or more provinces.

There is a real difference between the sovereignty of a Canadian province and a US state. In Canada the federal government has substantially more legal authority. Actually, a better way to look at it is that a province has a lot less authority.

> Name one indictable offense that has force in another part of Canada but not one or more provinces.

Possession of Marijuana in BC vs the rest of the country.

Nice try :)

>>>This so-called not-withstanding clause effectively grounds British-style parliamentary supremacy at the provincial level.

Um, that is my point. All of Canada is under a single constitution and, technically, one Queen. The US has multiple constitutions, at least one of which (MA) predates the US federal. Find a Canadian province with a constitution allowing it to ignore actions of the national government, ignore without separating. I can cite dozens, hundreds of areas where US states can tell the feds to take a hike. In the community of nations, that is strange.

> I thought the reason was going to be related to the increment of sea levels

It's still probably a good test-case for that soon-to-be-more-common situation.

Newfoundland is mostly cliffs around the ocean.