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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

A real challenge with Canada is that we are a big, diverse country that is dominated politically and population wise by 2-3 cites. The concerns and experiences of the city dwellers have little in common of smaller towns away from Toronto, or remote areas. So we get rules that exist to appease affluent urbanites that basically shaft the rural folk. I think the US has a similar problem, but we are way more sparsely populated and the federal government has more power. I have always been a federalist, but I think it's time to start talking about how we break up the country, so we don't have remote rule over people that it does nothing for.

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The US is the opposite - due to the Electoral College and shape of many state districts, rural areas have a much larger, disproportionate share of voting power than urban areas.

At the federal level rural states are over-weighted (because Senate) but at the state level the cities run the state.

It always amuses me when urban and inner suburb dwellers want big federal government. They'd have a lot more latitude to run things their way if the commerce clause got reigned in and the 10A got some respect.

How is this true in red southern states like Louisiana, TN etc?

Because the populations of their cities and suburbs are red (remember, we're talking at the margins here) to the point that required items on the official blue platform that blue candidates must espouse in order to get blue funding are deal breakers to them (at the margins).

HN always has a wide blind spot for how much the average person's beliefs are mixed and matched from the left and right. Ask the office janitor or delivery truck driver what he/she thinks about abortion and LGBTQ rights and then ask them what they think about min-wage and healthcare. Odds are you'll get points from both parties represented. Red states are reliably red because those people reliably care about things from the red platform more than they care about things from the blue platform and blue states are blue for the same reason.

> Because the populations of their cities and suburbs are red (remember, we're talking at the margins here)

That's just demonstrably false. Take a look at this election results map of Texas: https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/texas/ . Or this one of Tennessee: https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/tennessee/ . Or this one of Arkansas: https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/arkansas/ .

In every case the largest cities voted for Biden. Texas is particularly stark because all of the top 4 cities, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin went for Biden.

1/3rd of the top 15 cities in the US are in Texas, but thanks to a good-sized rural citizenship, nearly best-in-the-country gerrymandering, and innovative voter suppression, the state is still deeply red-controlled.

Much larger than urban areas? No. That’s clearly not true when 5 or 6 most populous states pretty much determine the winner.

It clearly is true when, of the 3 times in the past 30 years that Republicans won the presidency that they only won the popular vote once, and in those cases Democrats won urban areas by overwhelming margins.

But rural areas don’t have more power than urban areas.

2021 being the new 1791 makes me very happy.

Please god make King County (Seattle) its own city-state. We've had enough.

Had it with these Federalists. Why did we even rebel if it wasn't to say 'screw you' to Georgie. I'm not interested in replacing a a single king with a panel of busy bodies. I'm interested in 'No Kings'.

Now excuse me while I tend my marijuana farm while being blisteringly drunk.

Or you could acknowledge that the rural folk will have to make more changes to their lifestyles than the city folk will in order to reduce emissions.

Should they bear all the costs? No. The city folk are consumers for those products created by carbon intensive ag. They should pay too, in higher prices.

If you're all about doing whatever you're doing, and screw anyone who wants to tell you what to do, then yeah, go ahead and try and set up your sovereign fiefdom somewhere.

But expect some pushback from others who want to actually address these problems.

Rural folk employed in industries such as agriculture and forestry are going to feel the effects of climate change the most. You'd think rural folk would be the ones fighting for climate action. Meanwhile, I don't think many urbanites in the retail or service sectors need to worry that their jobs will disappear with a changing climate, yet they're the ones voting for change.

As someone who lives in Prince George, BC, the wilful disregard for the environment by the locals given the town's dependence on lumber is incredible.

The reality is just the opposite: urban areas produce the majority of greenhouse gases and consume the majority of energy.

If GP doesn't want to be part of the country, and others in his area agree, why would you stop them? Do you not believe in consent of the governed?

You won't BE addressing them in a city, you will be addressing them in a field or a mine. You will either have to live the standard of living you are apparently unwittingly espousing, or you won't be addressing what you see as the problem.

Just off the top of my head, big cities include Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Halifax, Hamilton, Kitchener. You make it sound like Toronto and Vancouver are walled cities in the middle of a vast wasteland, but most Canadians live in places with >100k people, and even more can drive to a mall within 20 minutes.

Do you want to break up the country so all the money and people are in one part, and you and a bunch of dirt roads are in the remaining part?

> Do you want to break up the country so all the money and people are in one part, and you and a bunch of dirt roads are in the remaining part?

Yes

> a bunch of dirt roads are in the remaining part

If you've never been, do yourself a favor. The parts out west with the dirt roads are the best parts.

Here's a little road trip I took late last fall on "the dirt roads" - https://youtu.be/pyQMt8om9Io?t=973

I grew up on a dirt road in rural Canada. I'd be happy to live in such an area and have a government that takes the local population's needs into account. The GP's dismissive attitude of "you and a bunch of dirt roads" is exactly what the rural population is up against.

A country made of "dirt roads in rural Canada" will stop looking like "dirt roads in rural Canada" in short order - no industry, few jobs, and every teenager with high school diploma will try to escape to an industrial nation next door.

You're taking being part of Canada as granted and then complaining that Canada is ruled by the wishes of the majority of Canadians.

>no industry, few jobs, and every teenager with high school diploma will try to escape to an industrial nation next door.

This already happens to Canada generally (it's a college degree, but that's just the new high school diploma these days). 1 in 47 Canadians (800,000 of 37.5M total, working population 24.5M) is an expat living in the US, because their quality of life (not just in pay; less interference from nosy neighbors has a positive nonzero monetary value associated with it) is substantially increased by doing that.

It's also worth noting that the provinces that comprise that part of the country are also net contributors to the economy; Ontario and Quebec, for all their population, are still net receivers of equalization payments in a way the supposedly massive tax base from Toronto and Montreal doesn't offset.

Of course, it's not like those places have any incentive to improve, because their entire existence is based around looting the better provinces. This deal is getting worse all the time, but since it's also apparently a Canadian trait to just sit there and take it...

The dirt roads their food travels on no less. Urbanites are truly shortsighted in their beliefs that the rest of the world depends on them, when the opposite is true. As if history does not show that cities come from successful settled areas rather than the opposite.

You can basically remove Ottawa, Kitchener, & Halifax from that list; they’re essentially small towns with one big attraction. Calgary & Edmonton are basically the same city too anyways.

>Do you want to break up the country so all the money and people are in one part, and you and a bunch of dirt roads are in the remaining part?

Well, that's the big secret about Canada: the place with the bunch of dirt roads is actually where all the money Ontario and Quebec need to pay their bills comes from (https://i.imgur.com/HnmVWkT.jpeg).

Guess the Federal government should have been paying attention to the economic conditions in its own provinces and the provinces to its East, but then again why should they bother when they can just loot the productive "dirt road" Western provinces (of both cash and political sovereignty that should by all rights be buying) instead?

I don't think your depiction of who holds the power in Canada is entirely accurate. The power you are speaking of is wielded more by suburbs. In Ontario that area is referred to as "the 905": the regions of Halton, Peel, York and Durham. When it comes to issues like car ownership, I suspect that many suburbanites want their SUVs as much as rural folks do.

I also don't think this legislation "shaft[s] the rural folk". Climate change is coming for all of us. On Tuesday we recorded the highest temperature ever in Canada, 47.9 C! Speaking optimistically, I would like to think that Canada is taking actions to protect all Canadians.

Unfortunately, the truth is that we need far more potent legislation than this. But there are many sacred cows in Canada when it comes to meaningful action on climate change — such as actual cows. If Canada were, for instance, to tax agricultural products like meat and dairy in such a way that their climate impact was no longer externalized, that would indeed be seen as "shafting the rural folk". But I don't see that happening any time soon.

I live in Duhram. Dodge Rams and F150s as far as the eye can see.

With vehicles such as the recently revealed electric F150, they can still have those cars to rip down the 401

I plan on purchasing one myself.

> I also don't think this legislation "shaft[s] the rural folk"

And then you proceed to list a bunch of reasons why your religion considers it a moral imperative to shaft the rural folk.

I fully agree with you, as someone who has lived in both of those cities and the boonies. Considering that 80% of the population is urbanized however (and another 10% rural in the Windsor/BC lowlands) the government really should cater to urbanites. Rural people are just going to have to rely on support from the provincial governments, or lobby to join the US.

I'd really rather see something like this handled as a tax on gas cars in the big 5 cities (or maybe 10).

These are going to be the places where alternatives are the most viable.

This is an interesting idea. I think a congestion tax would do much more to address driving generally in places where there are lots of alternatives. If governments wants to add "green" exceptions then so be it. This keeps it local, if it's mandated at the municipal level.

48% of Canada's population is in 5 metro areas alone. So it shouldn't be surprising - when majority rules - that city dwellers are dominating politically.

I don't think the answer is giving more power to the federal government, in both cases, since most of the votes will be coming from these 2-3 cities.

Your rationale is the primary reason why the US has the electoral system it does. So the federalists wouldn't dominate the country.

This is how US "blue states" work.

At least according to the rural population.

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