Sure, but one large government is better than eleven large governments. No need to duplicate the bureaucracy.

The question is whether fucks should be clustered.

#PREACH

In all seriously, I can not see the elimination of provinces working very well. Especially with strong identities attached to provinces such as Quebec, and even the ones out East. Perhaps you can advocate for less provincial power, but elimination..? No.

Canada is really big and people like to make decisions locally (or as locally as possible). I'm fine with federalism, although I would make some modifications to Canadian federalism.

I agree. It's impossible to get rid of canadian federalism any time soon. I think the provinces can be an important balance and counterweight to the central government. The main problem I see is allowing provinces to opt out of federal programs. There needs to be a better way to have all of the provinces on the same page.

The central government of Canada on the whole has no idea how to oversee the northern Yukon beyond Whitehorse and the upper shores of the Hudson. Simply based on geography and culture, Canada is one of the last places where a massive centralization movement should occur.

Don't know if Merirosvo meant to distinguish between provinces and territories, in which case Yukon, NW and Nunavut wouldn't fall into the proposed central government.

Yeah, I didn't catch that but that's a fair point. Even so, I don't see how you could leave the territories entirely out of the government (though I imagine a large faction of people up there, particularly the crowd I used to hang with in the Yukon, would fully support exemption from everything related to government).

Federation has worked well for us in Australia, it's not perfect, but perfection in Government is an unrealistic expectation.
We have occasional public discussion about getting rid of state governments and strengthening local council's, but I don't think it will happen.
There are many similarities between Canada and Australia, large countries with small populations, a gradual improvement with the way we're treating the indigineous people after some appalling dispossession and extermination in the past
We also share a history of similar relationships with the United Kingdom
I've just borrowed a DVD about our first Governor, Arthur Phillip, Governor, Sailor, Spy.
Governors Phillip and Macquarie were the two best Governors in the early history of "English" settlement
The infamous Bligh, of the mutiny on the Bounty, later briefly was a Governor of New South Wales, and was deposed in a military coup, so he is distinguished in history of being a leader at the centre of two "mutinies", at sea and on land.

It's my opinion that persons who whinge, whine and bitch about their "democratic" Governments but who refuse to work cooperatively to improve them deserve to live under a corrupt and brutal dictatorship

Treatment of indigenous people in Canada and Australia is shitty at best regardless of how it might compare to the past. Treatment of the environment despite its pervasiveness across basically every facet of everyday life in both places is also shitty at best. That is probably the set of issues that the centralized governments love to ignore the most and that's where local governments are sorely needed to step up and tell the big bad federalists to stop trying to know everything and leave the local issues to the locals.

The US would be pretty darn difficult to manage with a unitary government.

Mexico is a "federalist" state that is actually rather unitary, and it sucks in so many ways

I feel that the best form of government must include aspects of both federalism and central government. On one hand, the biggest benefits of being a sovereign nation are the pooling of resources, both on the supply and demand side. On the other side, each region of a nation is different, and require different rules and laws to suit their situation.

Not to mention that unitarism has an important share of blame for mexico losing Texas (together with those bastards "texans" of course)

Only based on observation and relatives' and friends' comments about govt in Canada, but my strong impression is that trying to impose a unitary govt would result pretty much in 4 bits: Quebec would secede, the Atlantic states as a not entirely cohesive] group; W Canada (which might further divide and see BC secede: I've friends in Vancouver who rattle on about this), and the rest. While these movements remain a significant minority at the moment, I'd lay money on moves to abolish state and territory administrations increasing those to majorities. And Quebec would defo go; no question.

If there is a unitarian government, then there is no greater power than the federal government -- nothing can stop their legislation, no even the state governments. Also, consider that combined with an ill-suited leadership spearheading the unitarian government. If the unitarian government is supreme to all, and the people that control the unitarian government are corrupt, incompetent, stupid, ignorant or ahusive or their power, then there is no force that can stop them from doing what they want. No (powerful) state governments to keep the federal government in check.

Consider a situation in real life: Note that Canada, as previosuly stated, has a federal system, and the UK has a unitarian government.

If I am a Canadian citizen, and I am overweight, and I want to go make it against the law to make fun of people only because they are overweight. So, I can go to the state government to try and pass a law that will do so. If they say "We don't have the power to do that, sorry", then I can go to the federal government and try to get them to pass the law. Maybe they will or maybe they won't -- the point is, I had the OPTION to try and persuade ANOTHER level of government to pass the law.

Consider now that I am a citizen of thd UK, with the same situation and goal. If I want to pass the law, I must go to the federal (unitary) government because the state government have no power (this is true -- they exist and are disbanded at the whims of the unitarian government). If they say "No, we won't do that", then I have nowhere to go. I cannot do anything about it.

The moral of the story here is: The advantage lies in the federal system because one has the option to go to another level of government to pass legislation, and also because if one level of government has too much power, they tend to become tyrannical.

To my mind this is a fictional contradiction. There's always some level of central government (foreign affairs, war, treaties) and also some level of local government (street lights, zoning). All the stuff in the middle is a continuous spectrum. You could argue against some clustering in the middle (for example, be against provinces), but I think it's much more worthwhile to think of functionality. For example, in my country we are starting to have stroger cooperations between municipalities, because many issues are regional. There's always middle ground you need to cover between the upper center and the ultralocal.

Is this another "who would win?" thread?

Democracy assumes representatives are accountable to their electorate. The more people they represent the less accountable they become.

There is a 1000-fold scale difference between the President of America and the Prime Minister of iceland. (Approxomately 300 million vs 300 thousand people represented)
As a result Iceland did something unimaginable in the US, they took their Prime Minister to court for mismanagin the economy - and won (wherher he will serve any time or not is a different matter) 'bigger' government and less local decision making reduce the power of individuals to participate in their democracy and have a say.

And when i say bigger i don't mean more state controled services, i mean those services serving large populations.

Democracy works better on a smaller scale. So i would say yes to federalism. And Unitary governments concentrate power too much resulting in a concentration of corruption. Less representative governance makes a state less democratic.

"It's my opinion that persons who whinge, whine and bitch about their "democratic" Governments but who refuse to work cooperatively to improve them deserve to live under a corrupt and brutal dictatorship"

It is my opinoon the 'whinging' or 'bitching' is actually a part of the democratic process of sharing ideas and discussing ideas.

4 of the last 6 Illinois governors have gone to federal prison for being idiots and corrupt

"For example, in my country we are starting to have stroger cooperations between municipalities, because many issues are regional."

This. Inter-regional cooperation seem like an awesome middle ground solution :)

How does it work (also where is your country?)

The Netherlands - about 17 mill people, so small enough. It doesn't *really* work; the municipalities have certain authorities, but miss others (that are domain of the provinces and central government). They end up trying to harmonise local policy, but all that effort does not give them overall policy.

Again, it's all about which functionality you need to delegate / centralise.
Your statement "Democracy works better on a smaller scale. So i would say yes to federalism" is also hugely dependent on which functionality we're talking about. In general, small scale democracy != federalism. You can have full local democracy about zoning, yet zero local democracy about war (I hope).

Zero local democracy can be a good thing. If my municipality or province would vote tomorrow to re-instate a yellow patch for jews, I'd be quite happy with a central government that would prohibit this. Democracy is also mob-rule to a degree, so be careful what you delegate.

@ Orathaic, as long as people work cooperatively to improve their government, they can criticise as much as they like.
It's the critics who refuse to help find solutions and won't engage that I was having a go at

@BlackJack, that is one of the most bizarre conceptions of a federation I have ever seen. My understanding of a federation is that there is a constitutionally entrenched division of powers between the levels of government. As such, jurisdictions don't overlap all that much, and so a law that fails at the provincial or state level can't just go up to the federal level.

Also, there do exist constraints on the highest level of government--at least in democracies. The courts, the constitution, the head of state: all of these can block legislation if necessary. This applies regardless of whether it is a unitary state or a federation.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Too anyone who are in favour of centralisation I would ask you to come here in Brasil and see what a massive clusterfuck it is.

Well, there are solid reasons to have both. Certainly, federalism provides for some local flexibility (which actually a central government could also do, if administered properly), but central governments are an absolute necessity when you have collective action problems (e.g., the race to the bottom problem with environmental and labor standards) or when there are clear violations of basic rights (after all, in the US, the main impetus behind "states rights" has always been the "right" to oppress and enslave black people, for example) that need to be addressed. (In these latter situations, there's a strong case for global government as well.) In many other instances there's no particularly strong reason to organize governments at some higher scale.

At core, the main issue is deciding what level of government gets the monopoly on military power.

"Democracy is also mob-rule to a degree, so be careful what you delegate."

Democracy is also mob-rule to a degree, so be careful what you don't delegate.

I'm not just being annoying, I think those two statements belong together and are essential. A small village has no say on national politics, so, for representation, you would not want national politics dictating village policies. In cases where smaller institutions would be likely to freeride on sacrifices made by others, we should have some federal control so everyone sacrifices roughly the same.

In short, you don't want to cluster the fucks when deciding what to do with one particular fuck (say, Amsterdam). When the fucks will fuck eachother if you don't, it's a good idea to cluster the fucks.

Therefore, the question of whether fucks should be clustered should be decided based on how much of a Prisoner's Dilemma you get if you don't cluster them. There's also good and bad kinds of competition. If you risk bad competition between different entities (aka fucks), put them on the same team (aka cluster them). If they have different goals however, clustering creates friction so it might be better to just let the entities decide for themselves, unless a single policy is needed to prevent competition as before.

Makes sense? My opinion of course.

Alright, lots of arguments, I will try to address them.

First thing: I realize this wouldn't happen for a long time. It's true that there's no popular support for it right now. But for the sake of argument, let's imagine there was public support since we're interested in looking at the systems and comparing how well they would work.

Next argument is that the provinces work to keep the federal government in check. As pangloss stated western democracies have strong checks on the government, federal or unitary: courts, constitution, head of state, and auditory agencies. Now, if people were really concerned we could implement multiple central government parliaments each with its own jurisdiction. I'd also like to point out there have been many successful European unitary states which still exist to this day. And the Weimar Republic that lead to Hitler's Germany was a federal republic.

I would include the territories in the unitary state. The territories don't have that much power as it is and they are way to small to form their own sovereign governments. I realize the culture is different but you'll have to show me why that is a problem.

For the issue of scale I will agree that there perhaps is a limit. But for Canada we're only talking about 36 million. Slightly less than California and half of France which is a unitary state. And, Ontario is almost 14 million anyway, accounting for over a third Canada's population.

In terms of what issues ought to be the jurisdiction to whom, I'd like to point out the current purpose of the provinces. Their primary role is to be in charge of healthcare and education. These two things seem to me like they ought to be a central government's job. In fact all the provinces use the same federal laws as a framework and they end up doing very similar implementations.

Finally, I'd like to quickly list off some reasons to make the switch: it would eliminate a lot of parallel bureaucracy as stated before, it would cost less money in the long run, it would eliminate silly restrictions of goods between provinces, it would lessen regional hatred, and it would simplify many things like paying taxes.

I'd venture any push to make Canada a unitary government would lead to the immediate secession of Quebec.

That's another benefit of centralization. It would force Quebec to decide whether it wants in or not once and for all. Instead of always holding the door open, never making a decision, and letting the cold in.

"You're either with us, or against us."

Yeah, that always works out so well.

It's not so sinister. You can be with us if you'd like, or you can be your own country if you'd like. We're fine with either but please make a decision. Constantly threatening to separate is not beneficial to the country.

Quebec isn't constantly threatening to separate. Sovereigntist support is actually quite low right now and Pauline Marois tried to distance herself from the idea of a referendum during the most recent election. You'll also notice that the BQ didn't exactly make a comeback during the most recent federal election either. There hasn't been a referendum in twenty years and I don't expect there to be one ever again.

I can't speak for Canada, but I am a huge advocate of states' rights in the United States. States' rights are actually enshrined in the American Constitution, in the form of the Tenth Amendment. Some (myself included) would even go as far as to argue that *most* of the functions of the present-day American federal government are unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment.

@pangloss

I'll believe you once Quebec elects zero BQ and PQ members. As long as those parties are alive they can still make a comeback and will always be at the back of Quebeckers' minds for when they want to make a protest vote. Also, isn't PKP strongly sovereigntist?

Canada is weird because we have what could be called a "centralised" federation. Most of the taxation power lies with the federal government, as do residual powers.

@Merirosvo, PKP is a Trump wannabe. And even if the PQ swept to power, they would be handily defeated in any referendum and would likely not even dare to try it. Separatism is dead.

@gunfighter. You ought to take a look at the language again. The tenth amendment reserves powers, not rights. States do not have rights, only citizens.

And the enumerated powers under the US constitution are very broadly written. You might think their unconstitutional, but Supreme Courts over many decades (who are often very smart lawyers) disagree with that fringe interpretation