If you’ve been following my Twitter account you’ve noticed a strong pivot towards space in the last few weeks. I’ll write about what I’ve discovered in the next while, but today, I take a detour into civil organization.
I have recently pondered a strange idea: the largest Canadian cities should be turned into provinces. This essay is not an argument for such a change so much as a meditation on the elements worth considering when making such a change. I started with a complex question about what are the forces that are already driving us apart, what are the principles that such a change would be predicated on, and what events would be required to make such a change a reality.
Principle: Polis - the City State
The first principle worth consideration is whether changing cities into provinces would be valid. There are examples of such cities doing well within their contexts.
Ancient Greece, the originator of many modern ideas of government, had a long history of a the polis - a city that was itself a state. Modern versions of this include Washington D.C., U.S.A., which is a federal district, Tokyo, Japan is a prefecture with the same standing as other prefectures, and even the Vatican City, which is considered a country.
Force: Population Redistribution
An immediate outcome of turning cities into provinces would be a redistribution of population. Canada's current population distributions vary wildly.
The provinces that would experience change in this scheme are Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, as shown in the following table.
Canadian Cities with a Population Greater than 500,000. Source: Wikipedia.
While Ontario, Quebec, and B.C. would retain their “larger than everyone else” status, they lose their “larger than everyone else combined” status. Redistributed, the list of provinces and territories would look like this.
New and Old Canadian Provinces.
Within regional areas, population distribution becomes much more equal after the change. For example Manitoba would break into Winnipeg (749k) and Manitoba (592k). Alberta would break into three provinces of Calgary (1.3M), Edmonton (1.0M) and Alberta (1.9M). Creating more equal areas allows for a discussion among equals at the provincial and national level instead of the currently unbalance. This change would move us closer to democracy and away from our current oligarchy.
Principle: Representative Democracy
The Canadian form of government is not a true democracy, where each citizen gets a vote in every matter the state considers. Rather, citizens vote for representatives who, at least theoretically, fight for their citizens at the municipal, provincial, or national level. This form of government is an oligarchy (rule by the few) in all but name, and often leaves the citizens who thought they had democracy (rule by the many) frustrated. The biggest problem with the system is that in our multicultural world, large groups are rarely homogeneous. A single representative is completely helpless to represent anything much broader than a personal opinion.
Without changing our form of government, we can make the system more representative by increasing the number of rulers and making them rulers of more homogenous groups of people. In this way, representatives are much more likely to be ruling over groups whose opinion they can begin to accurately represent. Turning large urban areas into provinces would move our politics toward better representation. This is especially true because one of the forces in Canadian life is the divide between rural and urban sense-making and sensibilities.
Force: Rural v Urban
One of the forces fracturing Canada is that people in rural areas see the world very differently than people in urban areas. This fundamentally different outlook creates oppositional wants and needs about how the populations want to be ruled.
Rural areas tend to be more conservative and self-sufficient, taking their well-being into their own hands and wanting less less government interference. Urban areas tend to be more socialist wanting, even needing, more services from the government. The two perspectives increasingly despise each other, and as the demographic bomb bursts over us with declining tax revenues and skyrocketing demand for government services, the animosity between the two groups can only escalate. Violence seems likely in the not-to-distant future.
A Personal Note about “Being Ruled”.
While I think it abhorrent that anyone should want to be ruled, this is Canada. People with my viewpoint are a vanishingly small minority that can safely be ignored in most cases.
The rest of Canadians want others to set the rules. Most are happy to abide by those rules, no matter how absurd or detrimental to their life and livelihood. They cheer when those who question the rules are put down, even with extreme official rhetoric and physical or economic violence. And those who prefer griping to cheering, have plenty to moan about with their coffee klatch or social media followers. Either way, the status quo remains firmly entrenched and people disenfranchised.
Principle: Greatest Resource = People
It is often said, more or less seriously, that people are a company’s greatest resource. This applies equally to states of all sizes. Does that mean our second greatest resource is natural resources?
Turning cities into provinces offers a perspective on this proposition. Will the change doom the urban provinces because they don’t have natural resources, or give them an unfair advantage because they have a lot of people? Either way, it starts to provide a unique experiment with the roles and powers of provinces in Canada.
Force: Provincial Powers
Provincial powers are broader than those of cities and extend to things like control over health care, education, and natural resources. Today, large Canadian cities often control rural resources, taking what they want without so much as a “please” or “thank you” to those from whom they take. Making these cities into provinces would force them to negotiate with rural provinces as equals for resources like food and electricity.
This change in power dynamics would provide rural areas with powers they currently lack. It would also provide an important force prodding cities to do better with the resources they receive and currently have. In other words, turning cities into provinces would start to create more equality amongst Canadian citizens, no matter where they live. According to the constitution, provinces should be able to trade freely, and perhaps this change would actually force us to fulfil that vision.
Principle: Free Trade
One of the cornerstones of modern economic theory is the principle that trade provides the greatest benefits to the greatest number of people faster than anything else. With each region producing what they are best at and providing it to all other regions, the lives and welfare of all citizens improve. Economists passionately argue that the more freely trade happens, the better it is for everyone involved.
The the status quo of trade barriers between provinces would be shaken an increase in the number of provinces. Rural provinces would find that they have much to offer that urban provinces would want, and vice versa. New enterprises would flourish on both sides of the provincial line. Not that the transformation would necessarily be easy!
Event: Negotiation
We are Canadians, so none of this would happen without some very intense negotiations. Everything will be on the table from trade agreements to how to split the political representation of the provinces. Canada has a long history of such political and legal wrangling and one of the best systems of governance in the world to ensure that it can happen according to rules everyone agrees on. In short, such a change would certainly create one of the greatest conversations (in terms of volume and passion) Canadians have ever engaged in. In the end, some of the forces creating centralization would lose power.
Principle: Decentralization
Centralization’s power is to provide things at lower cost, mostly through economies of scale. The price of that lower cost, though, is that everyone must receive the same treatment. In a country where individuals matter, multiculturalism preached for decades, and an honest attempt made to embrace people’s differences, people chafe under a one-size-fits-all political rules.
Decentralization’s power is to provide more customization. Decentralized states can provide the same or similar services tailored to much more homogeneous populations. The cost of such customization is a higher price tag.
Corruption and waste are also worth considering. Larger systems naturally create more of both and more efficiently hide corruption and waste. Though economies of scale favour large consumer bases, small, lean operations use resources efficiently and make hiding grift difficult.
By turning the country’s largest cities into provinces, significant decentralization would occur without radical changes to the constitution or other legal edifices. This would provide services better tailored to the population being served, making all citizen better off. We might also see service delivery efficiency improve as provincial power centres shift and then re-align.
Principle: Provincial Capitals
One of the interesting aspects of capital cities, whether they are provincial or national, is how important they are to the economic life of the district. Another interesting aspect is how much of the economic life of a district gets subsumed into the capital city to the detriment of other areas.
By turning large cities into provinces, the provincial capital would change in five provinces. Assuming size to be the deciding factor in choosing a new capital, in Manitoba, the second largest city (Brandon) would become the capital. In Alberta, BC and Quebec, it would be the third largest city (Red Deer, Burnaby, and Laval. respectively) And in Ontario, the sixth largest city (London) would become the provincial capital. Considerations other than size might also prevail in choosing new capitals, though.
All of the new capitals would immediately start to benefit from increased political and economic activity. New civic centres would bring new energy to the entire region, upsetting old power structures without destroying the foundations of governance Canadians rely on.
The move of capital cities into more rural areas would drive development money deeper into rural areas instead of coalescing in the largest cities. Canada, for all its advantages, remains woefully under developed outside of the major cities. Since some areas are highly developed, they receive outsized attention, creating resentments that sometime boil into cries of secession.
Force: Secession
While most Canadians are well aware of the desire of Quebec to secede from Canada, few seem aware of similar western desires (usually centred on Alberta, but hardly exclusive to Alberta). Even many of the people living in Alberta that I talk to are unaware of how large the support for such a breakup is.
Yet federalism should provide a mechanism for different provinces or territories to rule themselves differently and work together to solve problems. The failure of federalism at this moment is the centralization of power that has happened which leaves provinces at the mercy of federal government decisions. Instead, the provinces should be confident about setting the direction and taking action for their constituents in ways that make most sense to those citizens.
The relationship between the federal and provincial governments would certainly change. Would the increase in the number of provinces, each dramatically different from the next, weaken the federal government, allowing control to be more localized? Or would it go the other way with increased federal power as the provinces squabble amongst themselves? Would we see a block of powerful rural provinces emerge? Or a powerful block of urban provinces? Or something else entirely?
There is evidence that points to smaller states being more likely to thrive than larger ones. Several European States and Singapore prove instructive in this regard. So, the argument of being too small to survive doesn’t seem viable, especially if the larger body of Canada remains intact and we start having more productive conversations.
Wrap Up
Whatever happens, such a change ensures the status quo would not be sustainable. Canada would change and those changes would have massive knock-on effects, some predictable and others not.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Perhaps I’m “sucking slough water”. If so, please do let me know, as all that algae is not going to improve my diet.
Photo by Lerone Pieters on Unsplash