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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>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.

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.

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