Reply #26: As a Canadian I find the state's rights issue/debate fascinating

[Posteritatis]

If just because it shows a lot of how different our systems can get, and what happens when your foresight isn't foresighted enough.

Our system started getting set up in the wake of the American Civil War, which pretty strongly shaped the way we were going to organize our own political structures. There was discussion about something vaguely similar to the US in terms of provincial versus federal powers, but after the neighbors spent four years running around being on fire the concensus is that that wasn't really appealing anymore.

So we decided to set up our system in a way that was generally the opposite of how the US system - prior to the Civil War, at least - was established, by giving the federal government the bulk of the power and leaving the provinces with the rest. How'd we do that? The short version is that a list of things were laid out that were federal responsibilities, and a list of things were laid out that were provincial responsibilities. (New things have shown up over time, obviously, that weren't on either list; those tend to get hammered out in an ad-hoc fashion as they appear. In the present, the more interesting political squabbles up here tend to be turf wars over which branch of government has a say in the gray areas.)

So, for instance, the federal government has the final say in diplomacy and national defense (duh), transportation useful on a federal scale - highways, railways, telegraphy and its descendants, shipping routes, and so on - and a substantial part of the banking system and (weirdly) the secular aspects of marriage. Sounds like the underpinnings of a strong federal government, right?

Of course, in the wake of that they decided to give the provinces things that weren't considered so important. You know, trivialities like administration of justice, or education, or health care, or property law, or administration and management of natural resources. Nothing that would confer any disproportionate power to a provincial government in the 1860s, seeing how local, small-scale and minimally-influential any of those things were.

Fast forward a century and a bit. That sound you heard is the Fathers of Confederation's foreheads colliding with their desks in a ringing chorus.

I just find it kind of interesting how you guys decided to start your run with a minimalist federal government and powerful states, only to get the reverse of that in the end in many ways - while we wound up trying the exact opposite and more or less got the same result.